A greener future depends on better batteries: to move away from fossil fuels, we need rechargeable batteries with higher power and energy density to store intermittent energy from solar and wind. Moreover, these batteries could completely replace fossil fuels in vehicles.
Metal-air batteries seem like the answer, with the highest theoretical ability to pack energy into a small space (a property called energy density) of all current battery types.
“If we can achieve the theoretical energy density of metal air batteries and use them in vehicles, we can have much more driving range and make them more competitive with internal combustion engines that are currently used in cars,” says Mohammad Banis, a Western University researcher whose recent work looked at the charge and discharge cycles of a sodium-air battery in action.
Banis, who works in Andy Xueliang Sun’s clean energy research group at Western, spent a full year stationed at the Canadian Light Source to develop new tools for battery research. Observing the real time behaviour of material during charge cycles of a metal air battery presents a puzzle: the soft X-ray technique used typically requires a vacuum chamber, which makes it particularly difficult to study a liquid system.
>Read more on the Canadian Light Source website.
Image: Mohammad Banis at a Canadian Light Source beamline where he studies batteries.