– credit, Anne Nygard Unsplash
A nano-scale pinch of gold dust may be enough to transform a previously-ineffective battery technology into a new industry standard.
As the demand for more reliable power systems grows in the renewable energy sector, the race is on to develop batteries that cost less but have a longer lifespan.
Precious metals are a key part of this effort, with silver and gold being among the most conductive elements on the periodic table. Silver is being used in new solid-state batteries, while gold has been used by Canadian researchers to solve a major issue with zinc batteries.
While zinc-based batteries are safer and more cost-effective than industry-standard lithium-ion batteries, a major obstacle to their use in large-scale, grid storage is their shorter lifespan. They fail sooner because they develop tiny, tree-shaped metal structures on the anode called dendrites, which cause the battery to short circuit.
Now, researchers from Concordia University have found a way to slow dendrite formation.
Using the ultrabright X-ray devices of the Canadian Light Source at the national laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan, the Concordia team found that “sprinkling” a small amount of gold nanoparticles on a battery’s inner surface can cut dendrite growth by up to 50 times compared to regular zinc batteries.
Their gold-treated batteries went on to work for more than 6,000 hours in lab settings, a 50-fold increase compared to uncoated zinc.
“Coating the electrode is known to improve battery performance, but the small quantity of particles needed for our technique and how they are arranged on the battery surface is a very new, exciting finding,” says Seungil Lee, a PhD student at Concordia and lead author of the team’s paper, published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.
Although gold is expensive, the technique the researchers developed—which sparsely distributes particles on less than 10% of the battery surface—could be relatively cheap to implement for large-scale battery applications.
“Because of the way that we make it, which doesn’t require any special lab conditions and only small amounts of gold, it just becomes dead cheap to put gold particles on the surface, it’s 1/100th of the price of regular gold coatings,” says Ayse Turak, Associate Professor, Physics, and Lee’s supervisor.
“It was a revelation for us. There’s so little material on the surface that it’s almost impossible to characterize by any other means. But X-rays at the Canadian Light Source provide a very strong signal, so we can see it and we can confirm it’s there, and where it sits on the surface,” added Turak.
Now the team is studying how the particle-coating technology could perform with copper electrodes for next-generation anode-free batteries. They’re also investigating whether sparse nanoparticles could be used beyond batteries, in other technologies such as sensors, photovoltaics, and lighting.
MORE USE OF THE CANADIAN LIGHT SOURCE:
Silver and gold are recognized in the investment community mostly as non-interest bearing reserve assets—safe havens from monetary debasement. Studies like these remind us that just because gold and silver have been used as money for 5,000 years at least, they have numerous current and future industrial applications.
Samsung’s new, all-solid-state battery, to be debuted first (it’s believed) in EVs will provide almost twice as much range as lithium-ion battery packs and charge within 10 minutes. The advent of silver as a key coating in the battery was one of several developments that saw silver prices rise parabolically between November and February from around $50 per ounce to $150.
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