South Korean scientists have developed a groundbreaking battery that can be charged in just a few seconds, marking a major step forward in energy storage technology.
The team from South Korea’s Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) achieved this breakthrough with sodium-ion batteries. Sodium is both cheaper and safer than the lithium-ion batteries commonly used in smartphones and electric cars. Sodium (Na) is also 500 times more abundant than lithium, and it offers the potential for even greater charge capacity and efficiency compared to its lithium-ion counterpart.
However, until now, sodium-ion batteries have had limitations that hindered widespread adoption, such as long charging times and low storage capacity. The KAIST team tackled these issues by creating a high-energy, high-power sodium-ion battery that can be charged rapidly. They did this by combining materials commonly used in traditional batteries with those suitable for supercapacitors, which are used in technologies ranging from regenerative braking systems in electric cars to controlling wind turbine blades.
The new battery outperforms the energy density of commercial lithium-ion batteries and could be applied in electric vehicles (EVs) and consumer electronics. Professor Jeung Ku Kang from KAIST’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, who led the research, stated that their hybrid sodium-ion energy storage device achieved an energy density of 247 Wh/kg and a power density of 34,748 W/kg. He said this breakthrough helps overcome the current limitations of energy storage systems, with potential applications across a wide range of electronic devices.
The research findings were published in the journal Energy Storage Materials, under a study titled, ‘Low-crystallinity conductive multivalence iron sulfide-embedded S-doped anode and high-surface area O-doped cathode of 3D porous N-rich graphitic carbon frameworks for high-performance sodium-ion hybrid energy storages’.
The discovery comes shortly after a team of researchers in Japan developed a new process for mass-producing solid-state sodium batteries, which could revolutionize the electric vehicle industry. The new technology has the potential to address range anxiety by significantly boosting the charging capacity of electric car batteries and more than doubling the range of current EVs.
