Salting the Battery

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Ideally, battery materials should be abundant, cheap, and safe.  NaCl (salt) seems to manage three out of three of these, but can it manage the energy and power density of less abundant and more expensive materials such as lithium? Faradion, an English enterprise specializing in “advanced energy storage solutions,” thinks that the salt of the earth may indeed be part of the secret sauce in their new battery.  Initial applications will probably be in large energy-storage systems associated with renewable energy, but forward-looking statements (we used to call them predictions) show the potential for lighter, smaller batteries that could compete with lithium-ion cells. Since the introduction of new technology does not usually come from a single source, Faradion is partnered with co-funders Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency; Williams Advanced Engineering and the University of Oxford. The group is building 3 Amp-hour prismatic cells “containing Faradion’s novel cell chemistry, and are being incorporated into battery packs by Williams.”  This will …