Not only are they more cost effective, they are also sustainable as they can be produced almost entirely without rare metals. In addition, they are less prone to temperature instability and could have a longer lifespan, improving the performance and reliability of electric vehicles.
A battery developed by scientists at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) could once again accelerate the transition to electric mobility.
As they describe in the professional journal Energy Storage Materials, they can fully charge and discharge the energy storage in just a few seconds, which is much faster than the normal process of filling a car with fossil fuels.
This is made possible by the materials normally used for so-called supercapacitors. They are energy storage devices with high power density – they are also known for their enormous charging speeds, but they can only store a small amount of energy.
Researchers have now developed a kind of battery-supercapacitor hybrid to take advantage of both technologies. In addition to high charging speed, the battery developed in the laboratory also had a longer range than previous energy storage devices. The high power density means that more powerful electric motors can work with this.
Now the big question is how quickly the battery will be able to be used in practice. The first sodium batteries are already being installed in electric vehicles in China, but for now they have to be satisfied with a low range of about 250 kilometers.
In any case, the newly developed battery should greatly exceed this, since it has a significantly higher storage capacity than the model currently on the market.
