NEW RADICAL ALUMINUM BATTERY PROMISES LONGER-LASTING POWER

By Piero Facchin

The world of batteries continues to evolve at a breathtaking pace, with new developments and extensive research in several countries.

Scientists in Australia and China are hoping to produce the world’s first safe and efficient nontoxic aqueous radical battery.

Teams from Flinders University in South Australia and Zhejiang Sci-Tech University in China have reported the first step in the development of these new batteries in a paper entitled, Lewis Acid-Induced Reversible Disproportionation of TEMPO Enables Aqueous Aluminum Radical Batteries, published by the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Most batteries contain hazardous materials and can pollute the environment when disposed of in landfills or dumped elsewhere. Materials such as lead, cadmium and mercury can poison people and animals and contaminate soil and water, and they remain in the environment for a long time.

The team has developed the first radical aluminum battery design using water-based electrolytes. They are flame-retardant and air-stable, and deliver a stable output voltage of 1.25 V and a capacity of 110 mA h g -1 over 800 cycles with only 0.028% loss per cycle.

Professor Zhongfan Jia, from Flinders University’s College of Science and Engineering, hopes to use biodegradable materials in the development of flexible batteries in the future to make the product safe and sustainable. “In particular, aluminum-ion batteries (AIBs) are attracting a lot of attention as aluminum is the third most abundant element (8.1%), making AIBs, a potential low-cost sustainable energy storage system.”

Environmental concern and research continue to evolve for the greater good in the battery field, and this is just another example of that exploration in the battery world.