All Charged Up: Engineers Create A Battery Made Of Wood

[The Straight Story]

The big idea behind Joe's Big Idea is to report on interesting inventions and inventors. When I saw the headline "An Environmentally Friendly Battery Made From Wood," on a press release recently, I figured it fit the bill, so went to investigate.

The battery is being developed at the Energy Research Center at the University of Maryland in College Park.

I really wasn't sure what a wood battery would look like. I knew you could make a battery out of a potato and wires, so I figured maybe they were doing something similar with a block of wood.

Wrong. The "wood" is actually microscopic wood fibers that are fashioned into thin sheets. The sheets are then coated with carbon nanotubes and packed into small metal discs.

The wood batteries use sodium ions, rather than the lithium ions that are found in the batteries of cellphones and laptops. In this case, the charged particles move around in the wood fibers, creating an electric current. It turns out wood is a good medium for sodium ions to move around in.

Now, wood is comparatively cheap. So is sodium. Liangbing Hu, head of the battery project, says he's hoping the new batteries can be scaled up so they'll be useful for storing the vast amounts of energy generated by solar arrays or wind farms.

http://www.wknofm.org/post/all-charged-engineers-create-battery-made-wood

[longship]

1. Battery technology increases seem to be incremental.

There's not been any big revolutionary changes beyond the current tech. That's not to say such a thing isn't possible. But it is very difficult.

Batteries have to have the following properties:

1. They have to be light weight.
2. They have to have large capacity.
3. They have to be able to be recharged quickly and many times without damaging their life expectancy.
4. They have to be environmentally safe.
5. They have to be affordable.

And they have all of these attributes simultaneously. For instance, it's no good if a new battery idea allows fast charging if the battery degrades after a couple dozen recharges.

I've heard about many of these incremental improvements the past few years. But whether they pan out and make it to market depends on so many other things.

Regardless, it is comforting to hear that so much research is being done. Sometime soon maybe there will be a breakthrough that doesn't require Einsteinium or something.

R&K