Design principles for enabling an anode-free sodium all-solid-state battery | Nature Energy
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Anode-free batteries possess the optimal cell architecture due to their reduced weight, volume and cost. However, their implementation has been limited by unstable anode morphological changes and anode–liquid electrolyte interface reactions. Here we show that an electrochemically stable solid electrolyte and the application of stack pressure can solve these issues by enabling the deposition of dense sodium metal. Furthermore, an aluminium current collector is found to achieve intimate solid–solid contact with the solid electrolyte, which allows highly reversible sodium plating and stripping at both high areal capacities and current densities, previously unobtainable with conventional aluminium foil. A sodium anode-free all-solid-state battery full cell is demonstrated with stable cycling for several hundred cycles. This cell architecture serves as a future direction for other battery chemistries to enable low-cost, high-energy-density and fast-charging batteries. Anode-free batteries are cost effective but limited by unstable anode morphology and interface reactions. Here the authors discuss design parameters and construct an anode-free sodium solid-state battery using compressed aluminium particles as the anode current collector to improve cycling performance.

UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering Prof. Y. Shirley Meng’s Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion has created the world’s first anode-free sodium solid-state battery.

With this research, the LESC – a collaboration between the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the University of California San Diego’s Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering – has brought the reality of inexpensive, fast-charging, high-capacity batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage closer than ever.

“Although there have been previous sodium, solid-state, and anode-free batteries, no one has been able to successfully combine these three ideas until now,” said UC San Diego PhD candidate Grayson Deysher, first author of a new paper outlining the team’s work.

The paper, published today in Nature Energy, demonstrates a new sodium battery architecture with stable cycling for several hundred cycles. By removing the anode and using inexpensive, abundant sodium instead of lithium, this new form of battery will be more affordable and environmentally friendly to produce. Through its innovative solid-state design, the battery also will be safe and powerful.

This work is both an advance in the science and a necessary step to fill the battery scaling gap needed to transition the world economy off of fossil fuels.

https://pme.uchicago.edu/news/uchicago-prof-shirley-mengs-laboratory-energy-storage-and-conversion-creates-worlds-first

    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      4 months ago

      If I’m reading figure 1b from the pre per review paper correctly, it looks like they might be very good. But I didn’t see any actual measurements in the paper.

    • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      4 months ago

      Last time the subject of sodium batteries came up, someone mentioned that the application for them makes that less important that it otherwise would be. Again, this is second hand, so take it with a grain of salt, but for the kind of mass storage they’re intended for, they can be less capable than lithium batteries and still be a better choice, if they’re designed right.

      I normally don’t like horning in with second hand crap, and I can’t find the post, but it made sense the way it was explained. The sodium batteries would be used for storage from solar or other power generation, and that allows for less efficiency being needed since it will scale better in terms of being able to have enough of them on demand compared to lithium batteries.

      Again, please anyone reading this, don’t take it as a truth, it’s just a casual, unverified statement of what someone else said, done for the sake of conversation.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      41·
      4 months ago

      Yeah, with articles about batteries the attributes they don’t talk about are usually pretty bad.