NETHERLANDS – The experts at TU Delft labs in the Netherlands are continuing their mastery of salt — at least as it pertains to battery chemistry.
The team made headlines last year when Professor Marnix Wagemaker was highlighted for research into adding a cocktail of salts to batteries, resulting in increased lifespans and decreased lithium dependence.
Wagemaker and others, including experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, are now at it again. This time, a fast-charging sodium-ion battery they are working on could offer stable storage, as well as be the game-changing alternative to costly lithium-ion power packs that use hard-to-gather metals, according to a report from Delft.
“My interest is to develop fundamental understanding and improvement of electrochemical energy storage processes in these type of batteries,” Wagemaker wrote.
Sodium-ion batteries are garnering attention from experts from a variety of labs and businesses, including electric vehicle juggernaut BYD. Part of the reason is that sodium is far cheaper and 500 times more abundant than lithium. So far, sodium tech hasn’t had the energy density — the amount of juice that can be stored in relation to the battery’s mass or volume — as lithium.
But Delft’s latest research is being billed as producing a trio of perks: high energy density, fast charge time, and a low cost. They accomplished the breakthrough by improving the battery’s negative electrode, the anode. As a battery operates, ions move between the anode and cathode through a substance called electrolyte.
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