Aluminum, the Future of Batteries?

April 3, 2005 – Vol.10 No.2

ALUMINUM, THE FUTURE OF BATTERIES?

The way things are shaping up automotively, cars and trucks in the near and distant future will have some kind of large and power-packed energy storage device as a main drive-train component. Hybrid, fuel cell or pure electric vehicle, no matter which technology moves to the forefront of automotive engineering, will all require a battery, flywheel, or pack of ultracapacitors to capture the energy of braking, add a needed boost of power for acceleration and hill climbing or be the sole source of energy to propel a vehicle.

Currently the state-of-the-art in battery technology is lithium-based batteries with, most recently, Toshiba’s one-minute-to-80-percent-charge topping the charts technology-wise. But will lithium batteries, helped with a dose of nanotechnologies, be the pinnacle of battery design?

Unlikely.

Next on the list for more research and development may be aluminum batteries. While aluminum has been used in the recent past as the sacrificial anode (thus fuel) in aluminum-air fuel cells, aluminum-based rechargeable batteries could be on the horizon.

Europositron of Finland has been developing an aluminum battery prototype that incorporates nanoscale electrochemistry technologies that will allow for recharging up to 3000 times (theoretically). According to the company an aluminum battery (again theoretically) if used in a GM EV1 (as a benchmark electric vehicle, though now mostly crushed) would be able to travel 540 miles (870 kilometers) on the highway between recharging, 430 miles (690 kilometers) in city driving.

Aside from the high theoretical energy densities of the technology - 1330 Wh/kilogram, 2100 Wh/liter - an aluminum battery could have other good points other technologies don’t. Aluminum is relatively cheap and abundant on the planet. And, so the company says, the technology could easily be incorporated into existing battery manufacturing processes.

The technology recently won Frost and Sullivan’s 2005 Technology Innovation of the Year award. The market/technology consulting firm said that Europositron’s aluminum battery technology could potentially revolutionize the global battery sector. Read Europositron at http://www.europositron.com/

(On the same page as the information about the Frost and Sullivan award http://www.europositron.com/en/info.html be sure to read the article that outlines how countries with excess renewable energy (like Iceland) could be used to build shipping container-sized aluminum batteries that could be transported, fully charged, to power the world’s electrical grids, then returned to Iceland for recharging or remanufacturing.)