Lithium-ion batteries are so ubiquitous that you’re probably reading these words on a device that has one installed right now. They’re pretty handy. They charge fast and can hold a lot of juice for your laptop or phone, so why wouldn’t we just keep using them forever ? Well, they require lithium which has to be mined out of the Earth itself, so that won’t last for all eternity. Oh, and they can explode, making them a risk when left next to your bed or in an unmanned part of a plane, so that’s not ideal. Luckily, a new breakthrough means we may be able to move on from them.
Enter sodium-ion batteries. As reported by Live Science, a new experiment performed by researchers at the Tokyo University of Science has yielded promising results.
Lithium-ion batteries work by using a graphite cathode to store the charged lithium ions—this is what actually causes your battery to be charged. Sodium ions need hard carbon instead, and previously, it was found that the sodium ions got jammed when trying to flow into the porous material.
Now, I’ll admit, the electrical course in my engineering degree was so confusing I decided to switch to film and TV studies, but from what I remember, as ions enter a battery—or the part of the battery that stores them—the build up of their charge creates a repelling effect that slows the whole process down. This effect is why your phone gets to 50% charge so quickly but feels like it takes forever to actually reach 100%. If the repelling effect were great enough, it could stop a battery charging entirely.
There are several benefits. As it turns out, sodium ions require less energy to cluster together and charge up a battery, and it’s also far, far easier to get sodium—we can pull it out of seawater using electrolysis.
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