The problem with solar power is storing it. Unless you
use connection to an electricity grid, the power has to be used immediately in
your watch or a road sign. Now the chemists of Ohio State University have
produced the first solar battery. A solar panel allows air to enter the device
through a mesh so that a titanium dioxide gauze photo electrode can combine
with an oxygen electrode to charge a lithium-oxygen battery.
A triiodide/iodide shuttle is coupled with the
electrodes to produce triiodide ions on the phot electrode, which oxidize
lithium peroxide. This means that in layman terms, the lithium-oxygen batteries
problem of over potential is overcome at last by chemical oxidization. Of course,
the aim has also been to cut costs, and this has been achieved, so far by 25%.
Normally there is also a loss of energy (electrons) in the transition from
solar cells to external batteries. By including the battery in the cell, almost
100% of the electrons make it to the battery and recharge it.
This is a breathing battery, according to Professor
Wu, the professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the university. It even
breathes out when it breaks down lithium peroxide into the metal. The titanium
gauze has 200-micrometer holes with rods of titanium dioxide grown across them
like grass b lades. Oxygen from the air can easily pass through. The lithium
part of the battery is a thin plate, underneath a porous carbon sheet and
layers of iodide electrolyte.
By charging the battery and discharging it, the team
could assess battery life by using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. With a
rusty coating of hematite (iron oxide) as a semiconductor on the mesh, the
battery achieved a normal rechargeable battery life. With new materials being
installed as cheap as that, we can expect even more economical and efficient
ways of grabbing the Sun’s light and using it throughout industry as our chief
energy source in everything possible.
Mingzhe Yu, Xiaodi Ren, Lu Ma and Yiying Wu wrote the
paper in Nature Communications as- Integrating a redox-coupled dye-sensitized photo
electrode into a lithium oxygen battery for photo assisted charging
We believe they’ve achieved a truly memorable
breakthrough here and hope they will continue to enhance our surge for taking
up renewable energies. Ways of extracting the vast potential of the Sun can
even stretch either to hydrogen production, using photosynthetic techniques or
as in this earlier French production technique - using simple copper oxide.
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