The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for the first time money for large-scale developments to create environmentally friendly and inexpensive batteries that should replace the popular lithium-ion batteries. For these purposes, a number of scientific organizations in Germany, led by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, were allocated 1,15 million euros by the Ministry for three years. The development of materials and technologies for the production of sodium-ion batteries is carried out as part of the national TRANSITION project, designed to create a new environmentally friendly and efficient base in Germany for the use and storage of excess energy from renewable sources.
Lithium-ion batteries have become a real find for electronics at the end of the twentieth century. Compact, lightweight, capacious. Thanks to them, mobile electronics became mass, and electric vehicles appeared on the roads of the world. At the same time, lithium and other rare earth materials that are used in the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries are rare and dangerous under certain conditions. In addition, the stocks of this raw material for lithium-ion batteries threaten to run out pretty quickly. Sodium-ion batteries are free from many of the disadvantages of lithium-ion batteries, including the almost unlimited supply of sodium and its environmental friendliness (within reasonable limits).
A breakthrough in the development of efficient sodium-ion batteries occurred relatively recently. From 2015 to 2017, interesting discoveries were made that allow us to hope for fairly rapid progress in creating low-cost sodium-ion batteries with characteristics that are no worse than those of their lithium-ion counterparts. Within the framework of the TRANSITION project, for example, it is planned to use solid carbon obtained from biomass as an anode, and a multilayer oxide of one of the metals is considered as a cathode.
Source: 3dnews.ru