One battery to rule them all: when it comes to energy storage technology, it’s hard to beat lithium-ion. However, the rise of wind and solar has brought forth new motivation to develop new batteries that offer higher energy density at lower cost, and it looks like magnesium is in the running.
In the latest magnesium energy storage development, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory have teamed up with MIT to demonstrate, for the first time ever, the potential for magnesium mobility in a battery.
The Magnesium Energy Storage Problem…
Magnesium offers two potential advantages over lithium-ion, on cost and electrical current. That’s because magnesium (Mg) is a multivalent ion, as Berkeley Lab explains:
Whereas a Li-ion with a charge of +1 provides only a single electron for an electrical current, a Mg-ion has a charge of +2, which means Mg-ions, in principle, can provide twice the electrical current of Li-ions if present with the same density.
So, what’s the problem? In the energy storage field there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch:
The catch for multivalent ions is that their increased charge draws more attention to them — they become surrounded in the battery’s electrolyte by other oppositely charged ions and solvent molecules — which can slow down their motion and create energetic penalties to exiting the electrolyte for the electrodes…
…And The Solution
Got all that? The basic problem is that the liquid electrolyte in a Mg-ion battery tends to corrode other elements in the system.
The good news is that Mg-ion technology is so new that researchers haven’t reached the end of the rope yet. In fact, the new study gives the boot to liquid electrolyte altogether and goes straight to cutting edge solid state energy storage technology.
That’s quite a leap of faith, considering that the conventional science indicates that magnesium moves sl-o-w-ly through most solids.
You can get all the details from Nature Communications under the title, “High magnesium mobility in ternary spinel chalcogenides.”
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