Energy Storage tagged posts

Imagine if your dead laptop or phone could charge in a minute or if an electric car could be fully powered in 10 minutes. While not possible yet, new research by a team of CU Boulder scientists could potentially lead to such advances.

Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers in Ankur Gupta’s lab discovered how ions, move within a complex network of minuscule pores. The breakthrough could lead to the development of more efficient energy storage devices, such as supercapacitors, said Gupta, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering.

“Given the critical role of energy in the future of the planet, I felt inspired to apply my chemical engineering knowledge to advancing energy storage devices,” Gupta said...

A new, superior alternative has emerged in the world of sustainable battery systems. Zinc-air batteries have emerged as a better alternative to lithium in a recent Edith Cowan University (ECU) study into the advancement of sustainable battery systems.

ECU’s Dr Muhammad Rizwan Azhar led the project which discovered lithium-ion batteries, although a popular choice for electric vehicles around the world, face limitations related to cost, finite resources, and safety concerns.

“Rechargeable zinc-air batteries (ZABs) are becoming more appealing because of their low cost, environmental frie...

A new fundamental understanding of polymeric relaxor ferroelectric behavior could lead to advances in flexible electronics, actuators and transducers, energy storage, piezoelectric sensors and electrocaloric cooling, according to a team of researchers at Penn State and North Carolina State.

Researchers have debated the theory behind the mechanism of relaxor ferroelectrics for more than 50 years, said Qing Wang, professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State. While relaxor ferroelectrics are well-recognized, fundamentally fascinating and technologically useful materials, a Nature article commented in 2006 that they were heterogeneous, hopeless messes.

Without a funda...

How the solar flow battery works. Image: Li et al./Chem

Scientists in the United States and Saudi Arabia have harnessed the abilities of both a solar cell and a battery in one device – a “solar flow battery” that soaks up sunlight and efficiently stores it as chemical energy for later on-demand use. Their research, published September 27 in the journal Chem, could make electricity more accessible in remote regions of the world.

While sunlight has increasingly gained appeal as a clean and abundant energy source, it has one obvious limitation – there is only so much sunlight per day, and some days are a lot sunnier than others. In order to keep solar energy practical, this means that after sunlight is converted to electrical energy, it must be stored...