Experimental Organic-Proton Battery Charges In 100 Seconds
Current batteries used metals. But a new organic battery uses electrodes from quinones and an electrolyte with ions of hydrogen. It cannot explode, it cannot burst into flames and works well at a temperature of -24° Celsius. Is organic energy the future?
Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay
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The majority of current batteries – such as the omnipresent lithium-ion batteries – are made from metals. These metals need to be mined and processed – usually in a way that is very damaging to the environment. And these metal batteries are also problematic after we are done using them. They are a major source of industrial waste that is hard to dispose of. That is why experts all over the world are working on batteries that would be better.
Christian Strietzel from the Swedish Uppsala Universitet and his coworkers developed a new type of an experimental proton battery that is based on organic components. This makes it much more environmentally friendly. But it also can be fully charged in just a few minutes and works even at very low temperatures.
The new battery is based on quinones – organic compounds that are often important in the energy processes of living organisms such as photosynthesis or cellular respiration. In the battery, the electrodes are made from solid quinone polymers and are surrounded by an acidic solution that works as an electrolyte. Otherwise, the battery actually works very similarly to lithium-ion batteries just it uses hydrogen ions that are also known as protons – thus the name Proton Battery
Sadly, so far the battery is very experimental. For each gram of the battery, it can only store 60mAh. But the battery also comes with a few benefits such as its very low toxicity and the fact that it takes just a hundred seconds to fully charge it. And the testing done so far shows that the battery can work for 500 recharge/charge cycles without any noticeable loss of capacity. Last, but not least – thanks to the used electrolyte the battery is much safer as it cannot explode or burst into flames. The scientists also point out the fact that current batteries lose a large portion of the power output at low temperatures. The scientists verified that the organic-proton battery holds its properties and capacity even if the temperatures go down to -24° Celsius.
So, the basic design of the battery works. Now, the key characteristics of the battery will need to be tweaked so likely it will take us a lot of time before we will see organic-proton batteries in the real world but we will likely hear about them in the future.
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