While hydrogen is a promising clean energy source, storing it in a practical, cost-effective way remains a major challenge. Scientists at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics have potentially taken a major step forward with a prototype battery that could one day solve the issue, as Interesting Engineering reported.
What's happening?
They unveiled the breakthrough in a study published in the journal Joule. Their gas-solid hydride ion battery eschewed the typical materials in batteries such as lithium, as Xinhua noted via China Daily.
The battery instead relies on hydride ions, which previously befuddled scientists, per Xinhua. They are as unstable as they are energetic, which made putting them in a battery extremely challenging. It's why the efforts go back to 2018 and include a few breakthroughs in recent years.
Xinhua revealed this latest one builds on work that delivered a workable material in 2023 and the first all-solid-state battery last year. As Interesting Engineering noted, it not only stores hydrogen and electricity simultaneously, but does so at normal temperatures and pressures.
It also delivered high energy efficiency and held onto 70% of its initial strength after 60 charge-discharge cycles.
"The new battery achieved 93.9% energy efficiency, which is one-third higher than traditional thermal hydrogen storage methods," researcher Chen Ping told Xinhua.
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Why does it matter?
Hydrogen is a promising clean energy carrier, but storing it usually requires expensive and unwieldy equipment, such as high-pressure tanks or cryogenic systems. Those demands can slow down and increase the cost of adoption for utilities, businesses, and cities. A battery that can store both electricity and hydrogen at normal pressure could help change that.
"Compared with other hydrogen storage technologies, this co-storage system delivers high hydrogen energy efficiency and may find great uses in mobile or stationary hydrogen utilization scenarios," the team declared in the study.
One day, green hydrogen could be a widespread energy solution. When deployed in a fuel cell, it produces water vapor rather than damaging pollutants such as oil or gas. Storing it is a large challenge demanding all types of solutions. The researchers' low-maintenance battery solution could be just the start of finding a cheaper, more seamless way to solve for hydrogen.
What's being done?
The researchers built out their prototype to show off its practicality. They formed a 10-cell pack that produced more than 2.4 volts and lit an LED bulb, per the study. While that's a long way away from the huge energy storage that one day could make a dent, it's still an exciting step along the way.
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For now, Xinhua reported that the next step is to further improve performance to move the tech to more practical use cases in industrial and commercial settings. The researchers said they plan to continue refining the battery and identifying better materials.
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