DETROIT – A new battery design could allow for more affordable, long-term energy storage, a press statement from Imperial College London reveals.
The Imperial team of engineers and chemists developed a polysulfide-air redox flow battery (PSA RFB) with two membranes.
This dual membrane design provides a workaround for some of the issues with PSA RFB, meaning it could be used to store excess renewable energy for long periods of time.
The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Nature Communications, detailed how they searched for an alternative to the electrolyte vanadium, used in conventional redox flow batteries, which is typically expensive and primarily sourced from China or Russia.
To start with, they decided to use a liquid, polysulfide, as one electrolyte and a gas, air, as the other. However, their polysulfide-air batteries were limited by the fact that no membrane could enable the chemical reactions at the same time as preventing the liquid electrolyte from crossing over to the other part of the cell.
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