A sodium-carbon battery that fully charges in nine minutes (1 Ah) and keeps that up for 3,000 cycles. That is what Professor Marnix Wagemakers and colleagues describe in a recent article in Nature. Wagemakers is attached to the Faculty of Applied Sciences.
Electric transport and preventing an overloaded power grid require more and better batteries all the time. For Europe, this means importing rare earths like lithium and cobalt, with geopolitical dependency and poor working conditions as by-products.
Sodium has been in the picture as a replacement for lithium for some time, but until now the limited storage capacity and lifetime affected the results. This has now changed. The sodium battery uses a new crystal structure of carbon with wedge-shaped pores that combines high storage capacity with high mobility of the Na+ ions that move in and out easily.
Ultimate spot
“We have discovered the ultimate spot where these properties come together,” Wagemaker told the Volkskrant newspaper. The result is fast charging and lots of energy storage. An unexpected bonus is that the battery lasts much longer than previous sodium-ion versions.
Wagemaker says that “I will never say that a discovery changes everything, but this research shows that sodium offers perspective. I strongly believe that sodium-ion batteries will become important in the coming decades.”
- Read also the TU Delft press release
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