The Nickel-Iron battery that Thomas Edison patented in 1901 has been redesigned recently for use in electric cars. The new design has been found to have almost as much energy storage as the batteries in the Nissan Leaf. However, it has also been shown that the NiFe battery can charge faster than the Lithium batteries used currently in electric vehicles and hybrids.
More importantly, NiFe batteries should be quite a bit cheaper than their Li ion counterparts due to the relative abundance of Nickel over Lithium in nature. Plus, these batteries aren't flammable, whereas Lithium batteries are.
Edison’s original design, patented in 1901, calls for two metal
electrodes. A mixture of iron compounds and carbon gives off electricity
that flows to a sheet of nickel, discharging the battery. Though hardy,
it didn’t usher in the revolution in electric cars that Edison had
hoped for. Ultimately it was eclipsed by other technologies, including
the lithium-ion battery, that stored and delivered more energy.
To resurrect Edison’s battery, Dai and colleagues reshaped its
electrodes at nanometer scales. Instead of simply mixing iron and
carbon, the researchers grew iron pellets on top of atom-thick sheets of
carbon chicken wire called graphene. Tiny plates of nickel perched atop
carbon tubes formed the other electrode.
This attention to detail united each metal and its carbon counterpart
with chemical bonds that provided a superhighway for electrons. A small
prototype battery charged in about two minutes and discharged within 30
seconds, nearly 1,000 times faster than traditional nickel-iron
designs. That speediness could be useful for juicing up a car in a hurry
or storing and releasing the energy flowing through the larger power
grid.
This new battery design still has a ways to go in order to be a truly viable battery for use in vehicles. The researchers need to show that these batteries can be scaled up in size and maintain their advantages over lithium batteries. They also need to keep up with the developing advances in lithium battery technologies.
Sources:
H. Wang et al. An ultrafast nickel-iron battery from strongly coupled
inorganic nanoparticle/nanocarbon hybrid materials. Nature
Communications. doi:10.1038/ncomms1921 Link
