Betting on a Metal-Air Battery Breakthrough

A government-funded begin-up claims it can make ionic liquid energy storage feasible.

Liquid salt: This image shows ionic liquids (the blue globules) in a beaker of mineral oil.

A spinoff from Arizona State University says it can develop a metal-air battery that significantly outperforms the best lithium-ion batteries on the marketplace, and now it has the funding it wants to prove it.

The U.S. Department of Energy last week awarded a .13-million analysis grant to Scottsdale, AZ-based Fluidic Energy toward development of a metal-air battery that relies on ionic liquids, instead of an aqueous answer, as its electrolyte.

The organization aims to build a Metal-Air Ionic Liquid battery that has up to 11 times the energy density of the leading lithium-ion battery technologies for less than 1-third the cost. Cody Friesen, a professor of supplies science at Arizona State and founder of Fluidic Energy, says the use of ionic liquids overcomes many of the issues that have held back metal-air batteries in the past. “I’m not claiming we have it yet, but if we do succeed, it genuinely does change the way we believe about storage,” says Friesen, who was named one of Technologies Review‘s leading innovators under 35 in 2009.

 

Metal-air batteries, such as those that use a zincanode, normally rely on water-based electrolytes. Oxygen from ambient air is drawn in via a porous “air” electrode (-cathode) and produces hydroxyl ions on contact with the electrolyte. These ions reach the anode and start to oxidize the zinc–a reaction that produces present through the release of electrons.

But like any aqueous answer, the water in the electrolyte can evaporate, causing the batteries to prematurely fail. Water also has a relatively low electrochemical window, meaning it will start to decompose when the cell exceeds 1.23 volts. These were two problems researchers at the U.S. Air Force Academy began tackling about 25 years ago. In the early 1980s they experimented with ionic liquids–salts that are a liquid at room temperature, and which typically can remain a liquid in sub-zero temperatures or above the boiling point of water.

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