Energy Storage tagged posts

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...

Dendritic fibrous nanosilica (DFNS), also known as KCC-1, has a unique fibrous morphology and a high surface area with improved accessibility to the internal surface, tunable pore size and volume, controllable particle size, which made it useful in the fields of energy, environment, and health. Credit: Ayan Maity, Vivek Polshettiwar

Dendritic fibrous nanosilica (DFNS) attracted a great deal of attention in a large number of scientific disciplines such as catalysis, solar energy harvesting (photocatalysis, solar cells, etc...

Schematic illustration of polypyrrole-manganese dioxide (PPy-MnO2) coaxial nanotubes to accommodate sulfur for high-performance Li–S battery. Comparison of cyclic performance of S/PPy-MnO2 and S/PPy at 0.2C. (Reprinted with permission by American Chemical Society) (click on image to enlarge) Read more: Improving the performance of lithium-sulfur batteries with coaxial nanotubes

University of Texas team has found that using coaxial nanotubes can improve the performance of lithium-sulfur batteries (Li-S).They used Polypyrrole-MnO2 coaxial nanotubes to overcome obstacles to using Li-S batteries in commercial products. Prior research has shown that Li-S batteries would offer users of electronics more energy storage—as much as 5X that of lithium-ion batteries...

The Bochum-based team: Piyanut Pinyou, Wolfgang Schuhmann, Sabine Alsaoub and Felipe Conzuelo (from left). Credit: © RUB, Marquard

Researchers have developed a hybrid of a fuel cell and capacitor on a biocatalytic basis. With the aid of enzymatic processes, what’s known as a biosupercapacitor efficiently generates and stores energy. The trick: the enzymes are embedded in a stable polymer gel, which can store a large amount of energy. Generating energy and saving it with as little loss as possible is one of the major challenges for today’s society. Energy production and storage usually take place in different systems – which is inefficient. This is different in the new biosupercapacitor, which combines both processes.

“Such a technology could, for instance, be interesting for miniaturised ...