Old chemistry reborn

There has been a great deal of creativity and R&D money that has gone into creating the next battery. The next battery is hopefully the "holy grail" that can deliver a lot of amps, can hold a lot of energy, will last for many cycles, and above all... is inexpensive.

And by "a lot" we mean every performance aspect - current, capacity, cycles - needs to be a great deal more than what we are using today. Except for cost, which needs to be a great deal less than what we have today.

So when news comes out about an advance in ZnMn batteries, one has to be interested because Zinc and Manganese are inexpensive. They are the two metals used in alkaline cells and in both carbon-zinc and zinc-chloride cells. These components are so inexpensive we find value in using them just one time and throwing them away.

This chemistry has been around for a long time. And over that time there has been a fair amount of interest in getting these metals in a rechargeable battery because of the low cost. Although in its rechargeable form energy density isn't the greatest compared to what we have today. But this new construction has shown great potential for number of cycles - 5000 cycles showed little degradation in the lab.

But lab results and production are worlds apart. What can be done in the lab is sometimes economically unfeasible to accomplish on an assembly line. We would have the holy grail of batteries by now if lab results could always scale up to mass production results.

So this might not be the holy grail, but it does help in one niche, that being grid storage. And Possibly starting batteries. So this might be one part of a two-part solution, one for portable power and another for stationary energy storage. It would still be an advance over what we have today.

Basically, the reason that ZnMn batteries haven't been able to recharge is that a fundamental understanding of the reaction wasn't understood. That understanding was how the Mn was dissolving into solution and becoming unavailable for a reaction.

The obvious solution was to begin the reaction with the electrolyte already saturated, in a particular balance, with Mn. And it worked. So the new understanding tells us the ZnMn cell works more like a Pb-Acid cell and less like Li-Ion.

But this brings up a great point. One of the greatest pushes in battery R&D is trying to understand what is going on in the cell to create and sustain performance. There is simply  a lot we don't know about the batteries we are actually using now. They work, but if we understood them we could make them work much better.

The devil is in the details, but so is salvation - Hyman G. Rickover