For more than a generation lithium-ion batteries powered everything from electric vehicles to smartphones. But that’s about to change after a team at the TU Wien University in Austria invented a new oxygen-ion battery that could revolutionize electrical systems around the globe.. Oxygen ion battery inventorsProf. Jürgen Fleig, Tobias Huber, Alexander Schmid (left to right) .Dubbed the ‘forever battery’, the oxygen-ion power cell is based on ceramics instead of rare earth minerals. It never breaks down and recharges itself using oxygen from the atmosphere. Unlike lithium batteries, which have a limited number of charging cycles, it never has to be recycled and maintains a constant charge capacity even in cold weather and climate extremes..“We have had a lot of experience with ceramic materials that can be used for fuel cells for quite some time,” says Alexander Schmid from the Institute for Chemical Technologies and Analytics at TU Wien..“That gave us the idea of investigating whether such materials might also be suitable for making a battery.”.The ceramic materials the TU Wien team studied can absorb and release doubly negatively charged oxygen ions. When an electric voltage is applied, the oxygen ions migrate from one ceramic material to another, after which they can be made to migrate back again, thus generating electric current..Plus, ceramics are as old as humanity itself and are abundant and cheap — unlike lithium which is scarce and causes extensive environmental damage to produce. For every tonne of lithium mined, 15 tonnes of CO2 are emitted into the air. A typical 80 kWh lithium ion battery found in a Tesla, for example, has a carbon footprint of about 3.2 metric tonnes of CO2. Other rare minerals, such as cobalt and nickel aren’t used at all..Lithium has the other disadvantage of being a finite resource and has to be processed before it can be put into a battery. More than two-thirds of the world’s lithium refining capacity is in China..“The basic principle is actually very similar to the lithium-ion battery,” says Prof. Jürgen Fleig. “But our materials have some important advantages.” .Ceramics are not flammable — so fire accidents, which occur time and again with lithium-ion batteries, are practically ruled out. In addition, there is no need for rare elements, which are expensive or can only be extracted in an environmentally harmful way..And they are easily scalable. The scientists said the ceramic cells could eventually power everything from watches to large energy storage systems that could be the key to unlocking intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind and solar..“If you need a large energy storage unit to temporarily store solar or wind energy, for example, the oxygen-ion battery could be an excellent solution,” says Alexander Schmid..“If you construct an entire building full of energy storage modules, the lower energy density and increased operating temperature do not play a decisive role. But the strengths of our battery would be particularly important there: the long service life, the possibility of producing large quantities of these materials without rare elements, and the fact that there is no fire hazard with these batteries.”.There was no word on how soon they could enter commercial production, but the university said a patent application for the new battery idea has already been filed together with cooperation partners from Spain.
