Cheaper, longer-lasting materials could enable batteries
that make wind and solar energy more competitive.
Researchers at MIT have improved a proposed liquid battery
system that could enable renewable energy sources to compete with conventional
power plants.
Donald Sadoway and colleagues have already started a company
to produce electrical-grid-scale liquid batteries, whose layers of molten
material automatically separate due to their differing densities. But the new
formula — published in the journal Nature by Sadoway, former postdocs Kangli
Wang and Kai Jiang, and seven others — substitutes different metals for the
molten layers used in a battery previously developed by the team.