Zinc air battery and lithium battery

Making rechargeable batteries that are safer last longer and have more cycles has been a key technical challenge for everything from mobile MP3 players to electric cars. The lithium ion battery technology we have used for many years has many obvious disadvantages, such as fast battery degradation, short life, not environmental protection, and so on. The lithium battery overheating and explosion accidents that have occurred for many times still give people lingering fear.

Among the many potential alternatives to lithium batteries, a new force has recently emerged: zinc-air rechargeable batteries. In fact, zinc air battery technology has been invented for more than 100 years. Activated carbon is used to absorb oxygen in the air as the positive electrode active material, zinc as the negative electrode, and ammonium chloride or caustic soda solution as the electrolyte. In the 1960s, thanks to technological improvements brought about by space engineering, zinc-air batteries began to be put into practical use. Today, many of the button batteries used in hearing AIDS are actually zinc-air batteries.

SINTEF set up the company ReVolt in Switzerland to lead the product development and marketing of zinc-air rechargeable batteries. The company said tiny zinc-air rechargeable batteries for hearing AIDS will go on sale next year, as will zinc-air rechargeable batteries for other mobile devices, such as cellphones. To the market, its charge and discharge life should be able to reach 300 to 500 times.

In addition, by referring to the fuel cell structure, ReVolt indicates that the zinc-air rechargeable battery will be used in electric vehicles in the future. Its charging and discharging life exceeds 10,000 times. However, the technology is still far from being practical.

The rechargeable battery technology that can be recycled has not been realized for a long time due to the structure limitation of zinc-air battery. In recent years, SINTEF, a Norwegian research institute, has realized the charging technology of zinc-air batteries by improving zinc electrodes and internal humidity control. The current rechargeable zinc-air battery has achieved more than 100 charging and discharging cycles in the experiment, and its expected life can reach 200. Compared with lithium batteries, zinc-air rechargeable batteries can store three times energy, cost half as much and have no risk of overheating or explosion.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.