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Related: About this forumA marriage made in sunlight: Invention merges solar with liquid battery
A marriage made in sunlight: Invention merges solar with liquid battery
September 22, 2016 by David Tenenbaum
As solar cells produce a greater proportion of total electric power, a fundamental limitation remains: the dark of night when solar cells go to sleep. Lithium-ion batteries, the commonplace batteries used in everything from hybrid vehicles to laptop computers, are too expensive a solution to use on something as massive as the electric grid.
Song Jin, a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a better idea: integrating the solar cell with a large-capacity battery. He and his colleagues have made a single device that eliminates the usual intermediate step of making electricity and, instead, transfers the energy directly to the battery's electrolyte.
Jin chose a "redox flow battery," or RFB, which stores energy in a tank of liquid electrolyte.
In a report now online in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Jin, graduate student Wenjie Li, and colleagues at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia have demonstrated a single device that converts light energy into chemical energy by directly charging the liquid electrolyte.
Discharging the battery to power...
September 22, 2016 by David Tenenbaum
This solar-charged battery, developed in the lab of Song Jin at the University of WisconsinMadison, directly stores energy from sunlight in a tank. Credit: David Tenenbaum
As solar cells produce a greater proportion of total electric power, a fundamental limitation remains: the dark of night when solar cells go to sleep. Lithium-ion batteries, the commonplace batteries used in everything from hybrid vehicles to laptop computers, are too expensive a solution to use on something as massive as the electric grid.
Song Jin, a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a better idea: integrating the solar cell with a large-capacity battery. He and his colleagues have made a single device that eliminates the usual intermediate step of making electricity and, instead, transfers the energy directly to the battery's electrolyte.
Jin chose a "redox flow battery," or RFB, which stores energy in a tank of liquid electrolyte.
In a report now online in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Jin, graduate student Wenjie Li, and colleagues at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia have demonstrated a single device that converts light energy into chemical energy by directly charging the liquid electrolyte.
Discharging the battery to power...
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-09-marriage-sunlight-merges-solar-liquid.html#jCp
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A marriage made in sunlight: Invention merges solar with liquid battery (Original Post)
kristopher
Sep 2016
OP
tazkcmo
(7,300 posts)1. It seems to happen weekly
Another step forward in solar energy storage. I'm grateful to be alive and able to witness the evolution.
awoke_in_2003
(34,582 posts)2. K&R
We could be leading the world if we would just invest in research. We need the type of challenge that spurred Gemini and Apollo.
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)3. Excellent.
Please scale up and implement immediately, everywhere.