Scientists have created a liquid metal battery that remains liquid at room temperature

Both liquid and solid state batteries have their own advantages and disadvantages. But scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a completely new type of liquid metal battery, in which they managed to combine the best from different types of batteries.

The created prototype of a liquid metal battery is the first in the world that can fully function at room temperature. Let's find out more about the new product.

What is a liquid metal battery, what are its pros and cons

As you probably already understood in liquid metal batteries, electrodes are made of liquid metals. This approach provides several significant advantages at once, namely:

• In such batteries, the formation of dendrites harmful to the battery, which over time destroy the internal the structure of the battery (which leads to a decrease in capacity and further failure of the battery) is simply impossible.
• Liquid metal batteries are very scalable. Indeed, to increase the battery, it is enough to take a large capacity and pour more liquid into it.

But, as in many other technologies, liquid-type batteries have one significant drawback.

In order to keep metals in a liquid state, most liquid metal batteries needed to be constantly heated to a temperature of at least 240 degrees Celsius.

Such a minus drastically reduced the possibility of using liquid batteries. Indeed, their work required rather bulky equipment.

What scientists have done

But in the new design, engineers decided to use alloys that can remain liquid at more acceptable temperatures. For this, it was decided to use a sodium-potassium alloy for the anode, and a gallium-Indian alloy for the cathode.

It is these alloys that can remain in a liquid state at a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius.

These two liquid metal electrodes were separated by an organic electrolyte, which is also in a liquid state.

As the researchers assure, during the experiments it was found that the experimental battery was charged several times faster and had a significantly higher density.

What are the development prospects

Removing the temperature barrier opens the widest range of applications for liquid metal batteries in a wide variety of fields and applications, according to one of the study's leading authors.

But before a new type of battery can find commercial use, some difficulties must be addressed. In particular, the used gallium is a rather expensive material and its industrial use is not entirely economically justified.

Therefore, now the engineers of the institute have directed their efforts towards finding a more widespread and, accordingly, cheaper alloy for battery electrodes. In addition, work is underway to increase the energy density of the battery.

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