A new hydrogen battery can operate at a temperature four times lower than current batteries, meaning denser, longer-lasting batteries.
Electric cars of the future could do without lithium-ion batteries, thanks to a new breakthrough in hydrogen energy storage at much lower temperatures than previously possible.
The discovery was announced in a study recently in Scienceby researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Science. The new hydrogen battery uses magnesium hydride as the anode and hydrogen gas as the cathode, with a solid-state electrolyte with a crystalline structure.
“These properties of our hydrogen storage battery were previously unattainable through conventional thermal or liquid electrolyte methods, offering a basis for efficient hydrogen storage systems, suitable for use as energy carriers”, said, in , the study leader, Takashi Hirosefrom the Institute of Chemical Research (ICR) at Kyoto University.
As detailed in , this battery can operate at 90 °C (194 °F), rather than the 300–400 °C (572–752 °F) temperatures required for current solid-state hydrogen storage methods.
This could make significantly increase the autonomy of an electric car.
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Hydrogen batteries with solid-state components already exist, as do hydrogen fuel cells.
However, the first require high operating temperatures; while the latter have difficulty reaching the efficiency of lithium-ion batteries and storing hydrogen gas under high pressure.
But with this new hydrogen battery, scientists have achieved total theoretical storage capacity of MgH₂ anode and high ionic conductivity at room temperature.
The design of the new battery – reveals Live Science – allows hydrogen gas to be stored and released in a solid-state cell on demand, with a capacity of 2030 mAh per gram.
For reference, lithium-ion batteries tend to have a capacity between 154 and 203 mAh per gram, while some of the best cell phones have lithium-ion batteries with around 5,000 mAh for the entire cell.
Although the operating temperature is slightly below the boiling point of water — meaning such a battery is not yet ready for use in everyday electronic devices such as cell phones or laptop computers — there is potential for this discovery to pave the way for simpler, more efficient hydrogen storage.
This, in turn, could lead electric vehicles to adopt hydrogen batteries instead of lithium-ion batteries, which are heavy and suffer from degradation and loss of efficiency over time.
Hydrogen has often been highlighted as one of the transition paths to green energy, although its production, storage and use in energy supply systems further complicate matters. If this innovation is scaled up and put into production, it could continue to push hydrogen as the fuel of the future.
