Not The Onion

21466 readers

1478 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

Links to news stories from...
...credible sources, with...
...their original headlines, that...
...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Please also avoid duplicates.

Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

kescusay@lemmy.world

186

Scientists Make Water-Based Battery That Could Last 300 Years Using Tofu Brine Ingredients (www.zmescience.com)

submitted 1 day ago by resipsaloquitur@lemmy.cafe to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/37619927

A battery usually hides its nastiest chemistry from view. Inside many rechargeable systems, useful energy moves through liquids that are strongly acidic, alkaline, flammable, corrosive, or difficult to discard. The battery works, until the same chemistry that made it powerful begins to eat away at its parts.

A team in China and Hong Kong has now built a very different kind of battery. Its electrolyte is a neutral water-based solution of magnesium and calcium salts, chemically close to the brines used to coagulate tofu. In tests, the device ran for 120,000 charge cycles, used nonflammable ingredients, and met several disposal safety standards, the researchers in China report.

It is not ready to replace the battery in your phone. But it points toward a cleaner kind of battery for the place where longevity matters most: the electric grid.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

or you could go with sodium battery, or LiFePO4, or thermal energy storage at this scale. hell maybe even pumped hydro

[–] MBech@feddit.dk 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Possibly, question is which one fits a given area the best. Pumped hydro needs some place high to pump it. Many places are incredibly flat, but in hilly or mountainy places it has some clear advantages. Thermal has the issue of losing the heat. You need to insulate a "battery" a lot, and at some point it just becomes incredibly expensive for very little results. It's not impossible, but it can be a very expensive solution. LiFePO4 has the drawback of needing lithium, which is pretty rare in most of the world. If what the article says is true, the "water battery" seems to be pretty inexpensive to build with quite available ressources, but the drawback is that it likely needs more space than other options.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

storage of heat is also very cheap compared to some other options and can just be using ground around boreholes, especially considering that most of residential energy use is in form of heat. if you have a hill that you don't need you can even put an artificial lake on top of it

there's a speciality resin (that new material) in that battery. resins are nonrecyclable. i don't think it can be 4x cheaper per kg than LiFePO4 battery because of that material

[–] leagman1@feddit.org 0 points 1 day ago

What if we build a mountain with a lake on top.