Additionally, aqueous rechargeable zinc batteries are promoted as a sustainable and cost-effective alternative to lithium-ion batteries, especially for renewable energy storage.
Instead, the primary ingredient is zinc, which ranks as the fourth most produced metal in the world. Zinc-based batteries aren’t a new invention—researchers at Exxon patented zinc-bromine flow batteries in the 1970s—but Eos has developed and altered the technology over the last decade.
Among the various multivalent metal ion batteries, aqueous zinc ion batteries (AZIBs) are the most promising candidate for low-cost, risk-free, and high-performance rechargeable batteries.
Zinc batteries have a relatively low efficiency—meaning more energy will be lost during charging and discharging than happens in lithium-ion cells. Zinc-halide batteries can also fall victim to unwanted chemical reactions that may shorten the batteries’ lifetime if they’re not managed. Those technical challenges are largely addressable, Rodby says.
Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative In the literature on zinc-based batteries, it is often highlighted that zinc offers significant advantages over lithium due to its abundance, affordability, and accessibility.
“From a physics perspective, sodium batteries inherently have lower energy density than lithium batteries.” A typical sodium-ion battery has an energy density of about 150 watt-hours per kilogram at the cell level, he said. Lithium-ion batteries can range from about 180 to nearly 300 watt-hours per kilogram.