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According to the "Nihon Keizai Shimbun" on December 21, Chiba University in Japan has developed a battery made of abundant metal aluminum. Compared with lithium batteries, aluminum batteries face a lower risk of resources**, and under the same weight conditions, aluminum batteries can store several times more power than lithium batteries. While the issue of extending battery life remains to be resolved, the use of abundant resources to produce batteries will undoubtedly be an important technology needed to build a decarbonized society once they are commercially available.
Lithium-ion batteries, which are widely used in electric vehicles and smartphones, are faced with the problem of ensuring a stable supply of raw materials.
The battery works by moving the ions present in the electrolyte between the positive and negative electrodes back and forth to achieve charge and discharge.
Generally speaking, lithium batteries use metals such as cobalt, manganese, nickel and lithium as the positive electrode, graphite as the negative electrode, and the electrolyte uses an organic solvent dissolved in lithium, and the materials involved are all rare metals. This makes it necessary to develop a completely new battery with little to no risk to resources.
Metals composed of "polyvalent ions" are expected to become new battery raw materials in terms of resource reserves and performance. Aluminum, calcium, magnesium and zinc are all potential candidates. In addition to their abundant abundance, one atom of these metals can carry multiple charges, so they will have a higher capacity than lithium atoms, which can carry only one charge.
Chiba University professor Tetsuya Tsuda and others have trial-produced aluminum-ion batteries that use sulfur as the positive electrode and aluminum as the negative electrode. It is important to know that aluminum is the third most abundant element in the earth's crust.
Aluminum is used in a wide range of applications, and ** is only 400 yen per kilogram (about 2.).$8), which is one-sixth of the nickel** used as the raw material for the cathode of lithium batteries.
One aluminum atom can carry 3 charges. If sulfur is used for the positive electrode, the amount of power stored per unit weight of the aluminum battery will theoretically reach 9 times that of the lithium battery. Since sulfur is difficult to conduct electricity, Professor Tsuda et al. used a material called SPAN that was compounded with organic polymers.
After the use of SPAN, the proportion of sulfur was reduced, and the resulting aluminum battery was more conductive and had a longer battery life, albeit with reduced power storage. The prototype battery is a small size for laboratory use, but it has been proven to be able to be charged and discharged hundreds of times. If you want to put it into commercial use, you also need to enlarge the size.
According to Professor Tsuda, another advantage of aluminum-ion batteries is that they can be integrated with the battery body. The outer sheath of the battery is usually made of aluminum, and if it is used as a negative electrode, it can also reduce the size of the battery.
Although there are still some issues to be solved in terms of safety of such batteries, it is possible that a separate battery pack will no longer be needed in the future if the battery is integrated with the aluminum body of an electric vehicle.
Some foreign companies have also paid attention to the application of aluminum in the field of batteries. The Australian Graphene Manufacturing Group is developing aluminium-ion batteries, which use graphite as the cathode. Although this battery stores less power per unit weight than a battery that uses sulfur, its fast charging capacity is said to be dozens of times that of a lithium battery.
A research team led by Kazuaki Musu, an assistant professor at Tohoku University in Japan, is developing a battery that uses calcium. The battery uses sulfur for the positive electrode and calcium for the negative electrode, and can theoretically store 4 to 5 times more power per unit weight than a lithium-ion battery. Kyoto University professor Takeshi Abe's lab is developing fluorine-ion batteries with similar properties to "multivalent ion" batteries.
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