People may think that the battery is the most inconspicuous product in the entire technology field, but it may drive the future of the world.
Smart phones are getting thinner and thinner, but the battery technology used is still not upgraded. In the pursuit of extreme design, the battery with the same volume is stuffed into a fuselage that is not much thicker than it. The consequences can be imagined. Similarly, the notebook's processor will be upgraded almost every two years or even a year, but the battery capacity is only a little bit larger than before.
The most commonly used in life is the lithium battery. The biggest problem with lithium batteries is that they are easily damaged. If you have a Nokia phone thrown aside for a long time, the battery is exhausted, and suddenly one day feels nostalgic, find it to be fully charged, while you wait for it to light up the screen, this deep discharge and recharge will The lithium battery brings a lot of physical damage, which will damage the performance of the battery over time. Of course, the daily charging and discharging will increase the damage of the lithium battery with the increase of the number of times.
However, in the future power supply scenario, batteries are indispensable, and electric vehicles, industrial-scale solar farms, etc. are inseparable from batteries. In the past five years, the cost of storing energy has fallen by half. More and more large companies are starting to invest in technology. The most representative is the Tesla “gigagactory†battery factory. Lithium batteries, which are most commonly used in people's daily life, are still expensive and unstable. For this reason, more and more new fuel cells have been under development.
I want a battery that is cheap and doesn't explode, but...
“The biggest problem now is still the high battery price,†said Eric Rohlfing, deputy director of ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a US government agency responsible for promoting and funding advanced energy technologies). . According to a survey conducted by Nature in 2012, Americans are only willing to pay about $13 a month to ensure that they use renewable energy to supply power, so the battery can no longer rise in price.
For utilities, the average American paying for electricity means that if grid-level energy storage is provided, the cost cannot exceed $100 per kWh. Since the Obama administration came to power in 2009, ARPA-E has invested $85 million to develop new batteries that will achieve this goal.
However, the goal of “$100 per kWh†is almost absurd in the power industry. Because until now, the goal of even $700 per kWh has not been reached. Although the above goals have not been achieved until now, it has become the goal of the entire power energy industry.
In addition, cheap energy is not necessarily reliable. Renewable energy may not be as reliable as fossil energy in terms of its ability to sustain power supply. If the demand for electricity suddenly increases, it is unrealistic to enable solar power on a large scale. The peak of solar power supply is during the day, and its power supply capacity changes with the movement of the cloud, and only the amount of daytime storage remains at night. The predictability of wind power generation is even lower. Using renewable energy to generate electricity, the grid becomes unstable, and the possibility of an explosion is not high, but it may lead to more frequent power outages.
It is no easy task to create a cheap and reliable battery.
Someone is working hard on new batteries
"We have never had a better electric car because we don't have the right battery," said MIT (MIT)'s Sadoway. Saduwei has experience in the smelting of aluminum, and he is thinking about whether the process of smelting aluminum can be a model of a new type of battery. Aluminum smelting is a very cheap and energy intensive process through which pure metals are extracted from the ore. 
â–² Battery prototype developed by Sadhuwei.
But the point is not about taking metal, but about the whole process. In Saduway's view, if the entire process of extracting metal can be looped in a closed environment, the energy generated in the process may be stored and used. He calls this a "melted battery."
However, in the above process, the temperature of the "melted battery" will reach 471 ° C, which is only a little lower than the temperature of the automobile engine, so it is more suitable to use the "melted battery" as the engine of the electric vehicle.
In addition to overheating, another more practical issue is the R&D funding. Even in the early days of the development of this project, both ARPA-E and French oil giant Total were funded, but the new technology required for follow-up research was quite expensive. In the face of Internet startups that are rapidly gaining profits, venture capitalists rarely have the impulse to invest in industrial or engineering projects because profits are too low. Perhaps this is also the reason for the slow development of battery technology.
New battery initial results
In addition, in the new battery research project funded by APRA-E, the battery developed by Aquion from Pittsburgh is the most commercially promising and competitive.
The new battery is called a "saltwater battery". This battery is closest to the cheap and reliable features mentioned above. The salt, stainless steel and cotton materials used in Aquion's "saline battery" are rich and easy to obtain. Resources, and none of these materials pose a risk of lithium batteries. In addition to being non-flammable and non-corrosive, the main manufacturing equipment for “saline battery†comes from the food packaging industry. Assembling the battery is as simple as putting the biscuit in the box.
Aquion's batteries have been on the market for nearly three years and are used in both home and public settings, with a total of 35 megawatt-hours of power storage deployed worldwide. Some areas and buildings use the “saline battery†power supply, because they are cheap and safe, and have not chosen to return to the fossil energy supply, but continue to use the former.
Even though Aquion's new battery is already used in a few areas, for many people, developing a battery is not a bad thing. As mentioned earlier, profits are low and investors are not interested; in addition, R&D batteries are not “cool†to many people. Matt Maroon, a researcher from Aquion, has been in the field since 2002, and he has been the youngest person on the team for a long time because no one is willing to do battery research and development.
However, 15 years later, the situation has changed, and the number of people developing batteries has gradually increased. Matt is finally no longer the youngest. People realize that the use of electrical energy is a development trend, which can help improve the environment and improve the efficiency of resource utilization. The new battery can be applied to a wider range of household electricity, utility electricity, and automotive electricity.
The application of the new battery still has a long way to go, just like the invention of the lithium battery. People began to study lithium batteries in the 1970s, and it was only in 1992 that Sony released the first commercial lithium battery. In the long process of perfection and development, we gradually entered our lives and entered our mobile phones and computers.
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