{"id":10130,"date":"2016-09-26T11:26:45","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T11:26:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=10130"},"modified":"2016-09-26T11:26:45","modified_gmt":"2016-09-26T11:26:45","slug":"a-marriage-made-in-sunlight-invention-merges-solar-with-liquid-battery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/a-marriage-made-in-sunlight-invention-merges-solar-with-liquid-battery\/","title":{"rendered":"A marriage made in sunlight: Invention merges solar with liquid battery"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"This<\/a>
This solar-charged device directly transfers energy from sunlight into a liquid battery and stores it in the container at lower right. During the discharge cycle, electricity leaves the device through electrodes at top. DAVID TENENBAUM<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As solar cells produce a greater proportion of total electric power, a fundamental limitation remains:\u00a0the dark of night when solar cells go to sleep. Lithium-ion batteries, the commonplace batteries used in everything from hybrid vehicles to laptop\u00a0computers, are too expensive a solution to use on something as\u00a0massive as the electric grid.<\/span><\/p>\n

Song Jin<\/span><\/a>, a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison, 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\u2019s electrolyte.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"This<\/a>
This solar-charged battery, developed in the lab of Song Jin at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison, directly stores energy from sunlight in a tank. DAVID TENENBAUM<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jin chose a \u201credox flow battery,\u201d or RFB, which stores energy in a tank of liquid electrolyte.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a report now online in\u00a0Angewandte Chemie International Edition<\/span><\/a>, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Discharging the battery to power the electric grid at night could hardly be simpler, Jin says. \u201cWe just connect a load to a different set of electrodes, pass the charged electrolyte through the device, and the electricity flows out.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Solar charging and electrical discharging, he notes, can be repeated for many cycles with little efficiency loss.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike lithium-ion batteries, which store energy in solid electrodes, the RFB stores chemical energy in liquid electrolyte. \u201cThe RFB is relatively cheap and you can build a device with as much storage as you need, which is why it is the most promising approach for grid-level electricity storage,\u201d says Jin, who also works on several\u00a0other<\/span><\/a>\u00a0aspects<\/span><\/a>\u00a0of solar energy conversion.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Song<\/a>
Song Jin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the new device, standard silicon solar cells are mounted on the reaction chamber and energy converted by the cell immediately charges the water-based electrolyte, which is pumped out to a storage tank.<\/span><\/p>\n

Redox flow batteries already on the market have been attached to solar cells, \u201cbut now we have one device that harvests sunlight to liberate electrical charges and directly changes the oxidation-reduction state of the electrolyte on the surface of the cells,\u201d says Li, the first author of the new study. \u201cWe are using a single device to convert solar energy and charge a battery. It\u2019s essentially a solar battery, and we can size the RFB storage tank to store all the energy generated by the solar cells.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The unified design suggests multiple advantages, Jin says. \u201cThe solar cells directly charge the electrolyte, and so we\u2019re doing two things at once, which makes for simplicity, cost reduction and potentially higher efficiency.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Wenjie<\/a>
Wenjie Li<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Having proven the concept of an integrated, solar-charged battery, Jin and Li are already working on improvements. One would be to match the solar cell\u2019s voltage to the chemistry of the electrolyte, minimizing losses as energy is converted and stored.<\/span><\/p>\n

The aqueous electrolyte used in the current study contains organic molecules but no expensive rare metals, which raise costs in many batteries. Jin and Li are also searching for electrolytes with larger voltage differential, which currently limits energy storage capacity.<\/span><\/p>\n

A system that both creates and stores electricity will be judged by cost, efficiency and energy storage density, Jin says. \u201cIt\u2019s not just about the efficiency of converting sunlight into electricity, but also about how much energy you can efficiently store in the device.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As solar energy use grows, the storage problem becomes more acute. \u201cPeople say the solar electricity capacity cannot exceed about 20 percent of overall grid capacity, because of supply shortages at night or during cloudy weather,\u201d Jin says. \u201cIn some places, further solar installations may have to wait until better storage is available.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Song Jin, a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison, 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\u2019s electrolyte.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10132,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",500,333,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333-300x199.jpg",300,199,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",500,333,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",500,333,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",500,333,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",500,333,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",500,333,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",500,333,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",500,333,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",500,333,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",500,333,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",500,333,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",95,63,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",500,333,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",96,64,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/song-jin-solar-battery_0015-500x333.jpg",150,100,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Research<\/a>","tag_info":"Research","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10130\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}