Lithium-Air Batteries – Likely To Be The Most Important Breakthrough For Deposing Gasoline
5 January 2010 | Green Technology | 1 Comment
With no viable alternative to gasoline oil in sight, the search for a more environmentally-friendly solution is still on, but, as it turns out, the day gasoline is to be displaced is years away, as current research standings seem to indicate. Nevertheless, some favorite gasoline replacements have come to light. One of them certainly is the lithium-air battery. As far as its capability goes, the arrival of this technology will surely produce great excitement in the scientific community, as well as for most energy corporations.
Lithium-air batteries basically consist of a air cathode which supplies air (more exactly oxygen), a lithium anode and the electrolyte separating them. In theory, they can store equally as much energy as a tank of gasoline would, and with the oxygen as a unlimited cathode reactant, the capacity is only restricted by the Lithium anode, thus potentially surpassing the current lithium-ion batteries energy storage capacity by 5 to 10 times. Nonetheless, in order for it to come into fruition certain critical steps in technology need to be undertaken.
“The obstacles to Li-air batteries becoming a viable technology are formidable and will require innovations in materials science, chemistry and engineering,” said Argonne Director Eric Isaacs. The Argonne National Laboratory, from the Department of Energy(DOE), is one of the leading research center for batteries worldwide. The battery is considered to be a long-term technology, which will require time, collaboration between the different branches of science and also money, in order to overcome the main challenges of the product: life, costs, performance and safety.
And the interest in this technology doesn’t seem to be short of, as the DOE recently gave away $8.8 million to the lab, into building out three battery research facilities that will be used for battery development, manufacturing and testing.
Tags: anode, Argonne National Laboratory, battery, cathode, energy, gasoline, Green Technology, lithium-air battery, lithium-ion, performance, research
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