New type of magnesium battery makes possible cheap and safe energy storage technology

　　Recently, Category 4 hurricane Harvey swept across the southern coast of Texas, causing power outages in 300,000 households. However, the magnesium battery developed by Professor Yao Yanxin from the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Houston and the Texas Superconductor Center has brought hope for people to cope with the problem of power outages in disasters. The team's new magnesium battery makes possible cheap and safe energy storage technology.

　　Recently, Category 4 hurricane Harvey swept across the southern coast of Texas, causing power outages in 300,000 households. However, the magnesium battery developed by Professor Yao Yanxin from the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Houston and the Texas Superconductor Center has brought hope for people to cope with the problem of power outages in disasters. The team's new magnesium battery makes possible cheap and safe energy storage technology. Yao Yan said in an interview with the Science and Technology Daily about his latest results published in the journal Nature Communications: "New energy storage technology can be used as a backup energy to fight hurricanes, and it can also make the grid more stable." Current energy storage technologies include Supercapacitors, lead-acid batteries, lithium batteries, etc., have different power and duration for different technologies. The selection of energy storage technology requires comprehensive consideration of indicators such as geographic location, cost, safety, cycle life, and energy density. Magnesium batteries use magnesium metal as the negative electrode. Compared with lithium ion batteries, they have three outstanding advantages: Magnesium is rich in the earth’s crust, about 13.9%; the volumetric specific capacity of the magnesium negative electrode is twice that of lithium metal; During the process, the magnesium metal negative electrode does not produce dendrites, so the safety is high. However, the solid phase diffusion of magnesium ions is very slow, and it is difficult to find a positive electrode intercalation material suitable for magnesium ion storage. "Finding cathode materials with high specific capacity and working voltage has become the key to the development of magnesium batteries." Yao Yan said.　　In response to this problem, they developed a new generation of positive electrode magnesium battery materials, allowing the battery to obtain a mass specific capacity of up to 400 mAh/g, which is four times more efficient than the earlier magnesium battery positive electrodes. At present, the voltage of the magnesium battery is about 1 volt, and the voltage of the next-generation battery under development can be close to 3 volts.　　 Although the research is still in the early stage and there is no specific timetable for industrialization, it proposes a new research idea that has guiding value for cheap and safe multivalent ion batteries. Yao Yan hopes that magnesium battery technology can provide solutions for energy storage technology under disaster weather in the future.