What happened to sodium batteries or whatever, I thought that was the next step like 5 years ago.
They’re in commercial use in China already. They have some disadvantages compared to lithium batteries as they don’t hold as much charge, but they are a lot cheaper to make and don’t require rare earth minerals.
https://cnevpost.com/2024/05/13/china-1st-large-sodium-battery-energy-storage-station-operation/
Well I would have preferred it to be used as a stopgap for now leading to other discoveries like this proton battery. Cause it seems like lithium will be in use for another 10 years at this rate. The whole situation reminds me of graphene and how that is barely making any advancement either.
It’s just different use cases for different tech. Sodium batteries are good for large scale energy storage facilities where size and weight doesn’t matter, or vehicles that are meant to just get around in a city. For example, if you have a bus on a fixed route then a sodium battery works really great. Proton batteries have potential for applications where you do want to have high energy density, but they’re always going to cost more than sodium.
Graphene is being used in certain high sensitivity/quality sensor chips.
Yeah, I have the same sentiment.
Why did I read deapthroat instead of dethrone…
the internet has ruined you 🤣
The batteries go in the other hole.
Is this distinguishable from hydrogen in some way?
Hydrogen explodes, is extremely fleeting/leaks through everything. And needs to be cooled to -200 to be in liquid form.
Hydrogen is a proton.
TABQ stores protons.
It sounds like it’s a bunch of hydrogen bonds with the anode.
My reading of the article is also that the anode is bonding with the protons (aka hydrogen nuclei) as part of the redox process to generate current.
Edit
Yeah okay while writing I get what you meant !
It seems to be a semantic distinction. Likely done to distance it from hydrogen fuel cells since these don’t require infrastructure for the storage and transport of elemental hydrogen.
Yeah, fuel cells are very different since they react the hydrogen. I think these batteries only use hydrogen bonds to carry electrons. Or to positively charge the anode and create current? However that works? I’m not a chemist or electrical engineer lol
It sounds like they’re a hybrid between hydrogen fuel cells and a traditional battery. Here’s the most digestible explanation I could find of how they work, but I can’t really speak to the quality of the source. https://www.solarkobo.com/post/proton-batteries
My understanding is that hydrogen has fairly low energy density which makes it of limited use for stuff like vehicles.
My understanding is that hydrogen is a single proton, though, and it sounds like TABQ stores it.
Different types of protons have different properties though. Liquefied hydrogen has around a quarter of energy density compared to gasoline, so that’s not really great.
It sounds like a hydrogen battery rather than just burning hydrogen as a fuel source. If I had to guess, the hydrogen positively charges the anode when it forms a hydrogen bond with TABQ, and the charge differential is what generates current.
Burning hydrogen is clean actually, you get get water as exhaust. The problem with hydrogen is that most of it isn’t produced in a clean way right now. Although, it is possible to do so. Volatility is also an issue, not sure if making a hydrogen battery could address that or not.
Storing hydrogen is also very hard, the molecules are so small that they cavitate through any solid material trying to hold them. I’ve heard loose carbon fiber is good at holding hydrogen but I don’t think they’ve figured out a carbon fuel cell yet.
This sidesteps the problem of cavitation by just breaking hydrogen away from the electrolyte instead of storing it as a pure fuel.
As far as I know carbon fiber is somewhat expensive to make too. That is a promising approach though. I imagine we’ll see a combination of different battery approaches going forward optimized for different use cases. I do think we’ll be seeing increasing amount of research going into this with electric vehicles and renewable energy becoming more common.
