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Batteries nanoscale energy storage vanadium

Published on November 11th, 2014 | by Tina Casey

11

Nifty Little Nano-Battery Is The Mighty Mite Of Energy Storage

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November 11th, 2014 by  

A team of researchers at the University of Maryland has come up with an elegantly simple nanoscale battery concept that they’re describing as the “ultimate miniaturization of energy storage.” The team isn’t just tooting its own horn. They already have assembled a working model of the initial design and they’re developing a more powerful version with an eye toward producing it in large batches.

nanoscale energy storage vanadium

Schematic of “nanopore battery” (courtesy of NEES, a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center)

The Vanadium – Energy Storage Connection

The secret sauce in the “nanopore battery,” as they’re calling it, is a compound of the silvery transition metal vanadium. Vanadium is best known for its use in steel alloys, but lately it’s been popping up all over the place in clean tech applications, particularly in energy storage and next-generation EV charging.

That makes vanadium a critical material for growing the domestic clean tech industry, but the sticky wicket is where to get the vanadium. Until very recently, there were no vanadium mines in the US.

The good news is, that’s changing practically overnight. The aptly named Canadian company American Vanadium is developing a vanadium mine in Nevada, and another company on our radar, Imergy, has figured out how to cull high-quality vanadium from mine tailings and other waste sources.

The UMD “Ultimate” Miniature Energy Storage Concept

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s take a closer look at the UMD breakthrough, which has just been published in the journal Nature.

 

The battery consists of an array of identical nanoscale holes, aka “nanopores,” stamped into a ceramic surface (for those of you new to the topic, nano refers to a billionth of a meter).

Each pore is itself a super-miniature battery complete with an electrolyte as well as an anode and a cathode made from the transition metal ruthenium and vanadium oxide, a compound of vanadium. As you can imagine the storage capacity is on the small-to-practically-useless side individually, but set up an array of these things and now you’re talking energy storage on a useful scale.

When you consider that about a billion nanopores can fit into a wafer the size of a postage stamp, now you’re cooking with gas.

Zoom out from the black and white image below and you’ll get an idea of what the battery would look like in real life, namely, nothing like any battery you’ve ever seen before.

nanoscale energy storage vanadium 2

Nanopores in closeup (NEES, a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center).

Here’s the research team enthusing over the possibilities:

From a fundamental point of view, our all-in-one nanopore battery array unveils an electrochemical regime in which ion insertion and surface charge mechanisms for energy storage become indistinguishable, and offers a testbed for studying ion transport limits in dense nanostructured electrode arrays.

By the way, did you notice how we slipped ruthenium in there? Ruthenium supply could become an issue moving forward, but the last time we checked, the global ruthenium market was looking pretty good for energy storage applications.

According to our friends over at Platts, the advent of cloud computing has dampened down the demand for ruthenium in the computer industry, freeing up the supply pipeline for other uses.

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About the Author

Tina Casey specializes in military and corporate sustainability, advanced technology, emerging materials, biofuels, and water and wastewater issues. Tina’s articles are reposted frequently on Reuters, Scientific American, and many other sites. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter @TinaMCasey and Google+.


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  • mds

    energy density? power density? cycle life?

    • JamesWimberley

      Come on. This is an important proof of principle, not a marketable device. How many passengers could the Wrights load at Kitty Hawk?

      Note that for a microbattery, the constraint is the overall size and weight of the device, Neither you nor I have any idea what a reasonable energy density would be in a microsensor weighing 5 grammes.

      • Douglas Card

        James – O don’t mean to be difficult, but once again you aren’t helping much. It seems your ‘answer’ is that you don’t have any information to offer.

        • Bob_Wallace

          “once again you aren’t helping”? Are you totally lacking an understanding of what James has contributed to this site?

  • Fred Bastiat

    The viability of many alternative energy sources has always depended on having the ability to store power for peak usage.

  • Marion Meads

    Time to buy Vanadium mining stocks.

    • Offgridman

      You are a little bit late, the two companies referenced have more than quadrupled in the past year since the announcement of Tesla gigafactory.
      You might still double or triple your money over the next couple of years, but I will let you do the math on what those that actually got in early are going to get.

  • johnBas5

    What is the energy density? (kWh/kg and or kWh/dm^3)

    • JamesWimberley

      For these devices, scale down by seven orders of magnitude to microwatt/h per microgramme.

      • Douglas Card

        Is that supposed to somehow answer his completely valid question? Sorry if I don’t see how it helps.

  • JamesWimberley

    Wow. This means that microsensors driven by energy harvesting could run 24 hours. Conceivably, the nanobattery could be fabricated on the SOC.

    The current generation of microdevices is illustrated by Freescale’s latest golf-dimple KL03 microcontroller based on the ARM M0+ processor (link), 32 bits and a power consumption as low as 209 μA at 4 MHz (more at full 48 MHZ power). That still needs a tiny power supply, but energy harvesting from the environment – vibration, radio waves – is only a generation or two ahead.

    BTW, the volume of vanadium you would need for a million such devices would fit in a carry-on bag, so supply is not an issue – as it is with big grid batteries.

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