The aluminum-sulfur battery offers cost-effective, fire-resistant energy storage, challenging lithium-ion dominance in safety and affordability. The three primary constituents of the battery are aluminum (left), sulfur (center), and rock salt crystals (right).
Aluminum, sulfur, and molten salts are earth-abundant, low-cost resources. The capital cost of aluminum-sulfur batteries is only 10 to 15% of that of today’s lithium-ion batteries. Additionally, the volumetric energy density of aluminum-sulfur batteries is comparable to that of lithium-ion batteries.
An aluminum-sulfur battery that is lightweight, doesn’t burn, and can be made much more cheaply than the lithium-ion batteries currently in use. When MIT’s Donald Sadoway sits down with colleagues to invent something, as he often does, the bar is set high. It’s not enough, he believes, for a new technology to be novel and interesting.
Today, a paper is being published that appears to offer a low price combined with a big boost in several of those measures. The aluminum-sulfur batteries it describes offer low-priced raw materials, competitive size, and more capacity per weight than lithium-ion—with the big plus of fully charging cells in far less than a minute.
“Our battery has a two-fold economic promise. First, given the high earth abundance of all components, aluminum, sulfur, NaCl, KCl and AlCl 3, the estimated cell-level cost of our Al–S battery is as low as $8.99 per kWh, which is 12% to 16% of that of today’s lithium-ion batteries,” the academic said.
“Our battery has a two-fold economic promise. First, given the high earth abundance of all components, aluminum, sulfur, NaCl, KCl and AlCl 3, the estimated cell-level cost of our Al–S battery is as low as $8.99 per kWh, which is 12% to 16% of that of today’s lithium-ion batteries,” the academic said.