When can the 18650 sodium ion battery bloom?

Lithium Grid News: Brookhaven National Laboratory (Brookhaven National Laboratory), which is outsourced by the U.S. Department of Energy, brought a breakthrough in sodium battery energy storage technology in July this year. This is good news for the wind and solar industries in the United States. It may also make fans of lithium-ion batteries feel chilly. Sodium salt is one of the two main ingredients in ordinary table salt. Scientists like the advantages of sodium being cheap, abundant, and non-toxic, but sodium Why can't ion batteries be commercialized in mass production? One of the fatal injuries is that the cathode of a sodium battery is composed of metals and oxygen ions arranged in layers. When exposed to air, the metal will be oxidized, which will reduce the battery performance, or even fail completely. If this major defect can be overcome, the sodium battery will have a chance. Shine.

The breakthrough technology of Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Chinese Academy of Sciences is to adjust the cathode structure and stabilize the battery performance by introducing different materials. According to the experimental results, The battery can be stably exposed to the air for 20 times longer, the capacity retention after 500 charge-discharge cycles has increased by 9 times, and it will not be damaged even if it is immersed in water.

However, this laboratory sample has not yet reached the point of mass production. Instead, the start-up company Tiamat established by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) announced at the end of last month that they It is already expected to mass-produce rechargeable 18650 sodium-ion batteries by 2020 (whether it will reach the target remains to be seen).

The first 18650 type sodium ion battery prototype was designed by researchers from several French universities in November 2015. This is the most commonly used cylindrical lithium ion battery Specifications, 1.8 cm in diameter and 6.5 cm in length, Tiamat spent only half a year developing this technology and realizing large-scale production.

Tiamat emphasized that the charge and discharge rate of sodium batteries is better (the speed is increased by 10 times), and the life expectancy is longer (the life of sodium-ion batteries is more than 10 years, while lithium-ion batteries The service life is only 3 to 4 years). If sodium ion battery technology is available, an electric car with a mileage of 200 kilometers can be fully charged in a few minutes.

More importantly, sodium severely despises lithium in terms of its reserves and price. The content of sodium in the local shell is 2.6%, while the content of lithium is only 0.06%; sodium can be extracted from seawater, but lithium resources are controlled by a few regions in the world (Argentina, Chile and Bolivia account for two thirds of the world's lithium); On the one hand, sodium is about US$150 per ton, while lithium is as high as US$15,000 per ton.

However, because the energy density of sodium batteries is lower than that of lithium batteries, the final viable finished sodium battery will be heavier and require more materials to manufacture, which will increase the cost. high. 'Ieee spectrum' reported that David Snydacker, a material specialist who focuses on the research and development of lithium-ion batteries, said that the performance of sodium batteries will be worse and cannot be perfectly integrated with the lithium battery technology of the past few decades, and there is still an unsolved problem with sodium batteries. It is to find or create a high-capacity anode (ie, the negative electrode of the battery).

So, although sodium-ion batteries may one day grow, when will that day come? We still don't know.