With the help of funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), University of Texas at Austin engineers are working toward a sodium-sulfur "dream" battery that would break through in long-standing commercial viability hurdles, according to a university news release.
A sodium and sulfur battery is an exciting alternative to the lithium-ion batteries widely used today in devices such as smartphones to electric vehicles, according to the UT Austin.
"I call it a dream technology because sodium and sulfur are abundant, environmentally benign, and the lowest cost you think of," Arumugam Manthiram, mechanical engineering professor and director of UT Texas' Materials Institute, said in the Dec. 2021 news release. "With expanded electrification and increased need for renewable energy storage going forward, cost and affordability will be the single dominant factor."
UT Austin graphic showing regular electrolytes and the electrolyte researchers are working toward
| news.utexas.edu/
Sodium and sulfur are far more common and more easily attained than are lithium and cobalt, which must be mined in the few parts of the world where they exist. That in mind, UT Austin researchers have been working for about 20 years to produce a viable room-temperature, sodium-based battery.
The UT Austin researchers have come up with an electrolyte that prevents sulfur from dissolving, which resolves issues in sodium and sulfur batteries, enabling battery life through stable performance in more than 300 charge-discharge cycles.
A paper of UT Austin researchers' most recent findings was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in November. The UT Austin research is being supported by grants from DOE's Basic Energy Sciences' Division of Materials Science and Engineering.
