A team from South Korea has made a much-needed breakthrough and invented next-generation sodium batteries that are both cheaper and safer than the conventional lithium-ion batteries currently used in smartphones and electric cars.
Sodium (Na) is also 500 times more available in nature than lithium, and at the same time has a higher capacity and efficiency than the Li-ion compound.
Until now, Na-ion batteries have faced limitations that prevented their use in the form of long charging times and low energy storage capacity.
Researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have managed to overcome these problems by developing a high-power sodium-ion battery capable of rapid charging.
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They did this by integrating materials commonly used in batteries suitable for supercapacitors, which are found in everything from regenerative braking systems in electric cars to adjusting the pitch of wind turbine rotor blades.
Scientists have developed batteries capable of charging in just a few seconds
The new battery exceeds the amount of energy stored in the space and volume of commercial lithium-ion batteries and can be used in both electric vehicles and consumer electronics.
“The hybrid sodium-ion energy storage device is capable of fast charging and achieving an energy density of 247 Wh/kg and a power density of 34,748 W/kg,” said Professor Jeung Ku Kang of KAIST’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and who led this research.
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“It represents a breakthrough in overcoming the current limitations of energy storage systems,” he added, saying he expected it to have “wider applications in various electronic devices.”
The research is published in the journal Energy Storage Materials, in a study titled “Low-crystallinity conductive multivalent iron-sulfide embedded S-doped anode and cathode with O-doped surface from 3D porous N-enriched graphite frameworks for use in sodium-ion hybrid batteries with high performance”.
The breakthrough comes just weeks after a team of researchers in Japan discovered a new process for mass-producing solid sodium batteries, the Independent reports.
The new technology could potentially eliminate limited range by significantly improving the charging capacity of electric car batteries and more than doubling the range of current electric vehicles. In a word, no more waiting for several hours to charge your car battery!
