Electric car charged in seconds, science fiction or just science?
New Flow Battery could charge Electric cars in seconds?
A new type of energy storage system could revolutionise energy storage and drop the charging time of electric cars from hours to seconds.
A new paper published in Nature Chemistry, discusses new nano-technology. The chemists from the University of Glasgow discuss how they developed a flow battery system using a nano-molecule. This can store electric power or hydrogen gas to give a new type of hybrid energy storage. This system can be used as a flow battery or for hydrogen storage.
Their ‘hybrid-electric-hydrogen’ flow battery is based upon the design of a nanoscale battery molecule. When a concentrated liquid containing the nano-molecules is made, the amount of energy it can store increases by almost 10 times. The energy can be released as either electricity or hydrogen gas. This means that the system could be used flexibly in situations that might need either a fuel or electric power.
One potential benefit of this system is that electric cars could be charged in seconds. The material is a pump-able liquid. Meaning the battery could be drained and topped up at a ‘fuel’ station. The old battery liquid would be removed at the same time and recharged ready to be used again. This could mean that the battery of an electric car could be “recharged” in roughly the same length of time as petrol cars can be filled up.
University Team
The approach was designed and developed by Professor Leroy (Lee) Cronin, the University of Glasgow’s Regius Chair of Chemistry, and Dr Mark Symes, Senior Lecturer in Electrochemistry, also at the University of Glasgow with Dr Jia Jia Chen, who is a researcher in the team.
They are convinced that this result will pave the way for the development of new energy storage systems for electric cars. It could also be used for the storage of renewable energy and to develop electric-to-gas energy systems.
Professor Cronin (pictured) said: “For future renewables to be effective high capacity and flexible energy storage systems are needed to smooth out the peaks and troughs in supply. Our approach will provide a new route to do this electrochemically. This could also have application in electric cars where batteries can still take hours to recharge and have limited capacity. Moreover, the very high energy density of our material could increase the range of electric cars.”
This research is funded by the University of Glasgow, European Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
