UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering Prof. Y. Shirley Meng's Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion has created the world's first anode-free sodium solid-state battery.
This work is both an advance in the science and a necessary step to fill the battery scaling gap needed to transition the world economy off of fossil fuels. Lithium deposits are also concentrated. The"Lithium Triangle" of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia holds more than 75% of the world's lithium supply, with other deposits in Australia, North Carolina and Nevada. This benefits some nations over others in the decarbonization needed to fight climate change.
Anode-free batteries remove the anode and store the ions on an electrochemical deposition of alkali metal directly on the current collector. This approach enables higher cell voltage, lower cell cost, and increased energy density, but brings its own challenges. "Sodium solid-state batteries are usually seen as a far-off-in-the-future technology, but we hope that this paper can invigorate more push into the sodium area by demonstrating that it can indeed work well, even better than the lithium version in some cases," Deysher said.
Funding: Funding to support this work was provided by the National Science Foundation through the Partnerships for Innovation grant no. 2044465Grayson Deysher, Jin An Sam Oh, Yu-Ting Chen, Baharak Sayahpour, So-Yeon Ham, Diyi Cheng, Phillip Ridley, Ashley Cronk, Sharon Wan-Hsuan Lin, Kun Qian, Long Hoang Bao Nguyen, Jihyun Jang, Ying Shirley Meng.Clean and efficient energy storage technologies are essential to establishing a renewable energy infrastructure.