Then came deciding what to pair the aluminum with for the other electrode, and what kind of electrolyte to put in between to carry ions back and forth during charging and discharging. “So, I said, well, let’s just make that a bookend. But the second-most-abundant metal in the marketplace - and actually the most abundant metal on Earth - is aluminum. The commercially dominant metal, iron, doesn’t have the right electrochemical properties for an efficient battery, he says. So, Sadoway started studying the periodic table, looking for cheap, Earth-abundant metals that might be able to substitute for lithium. In addition to being expensive, lithium-ion batteries contain a flammable electrolyte, making them less than ideal for transportation. Elliott Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry. “I wanted to invent something that was better, much better, than lithium-ion batteries for small-scale stationary storage, and ultimately for automotive ,” explains Sadoway, who is the John F. The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a new kind of battery, made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials, that could help to fill that gap. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive for most such applications, and other options such as pumped hydro require specific topography that’s not always available. As the world builds out ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems, the need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup systems to provide power when the sun is down and the air is calm.
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