Fluidic Energy Captures $5.13 Million in Funding from DOE for Metal-Air Battery

The funding, via the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, is delivered courtesy of a new U.S. government component, ARPA-E, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which funds non-traditional energy research and development.

 

The DOE is headed up by Nobel prizewinning scientist Dr. Steven Chu, who spent most of his career at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), a research arm of the DOE. ARPA-E is led by Arun Majumdar, the director of LBNL and a materials science innovator who achieved the nanotechnology breakthrough which recovers energy lost (as heat) during electricity production to increase efficiency.

 

At one-third the cost of lithium-ion batteries, the development and future commercialization of Fluidic Energy’s battery could move electric vehicles, or EVs, into the mainstream of global auto production and sales.

 

The design comes courtesy of Cody Friesen, professor of materials science at ASU and the founder of Fluidic Energy. Collaborating with other researchers, Friesen hopes to create a prototype battery using ionic liquids as an electrolyte, which will overcome problems faced by previous metal-air battery prototypes which used water, leading to evaporation and eventual battery failure. 

 

Unlike water, ionic liquids (also known as ionic fluids, liquid salts, and liquid electrolytes) don’t evaporate because they are formed from salts which remain liquid at room temperature. This includes common table salt, or sodium chloride, and potassium nitrates that, when heated, melt and undergo a phase change into a liquid comprised almost entirely of ions. These high-temperature ionic liquids have their counterpart in room temperature ionic liquids like methyl compounds, alkyl compounds and ammonium compounds, all of which accommodate nano-particulate assemblages of metals in solution.

 

Such batteries could also offer better electrochemical stability (of up to 5 volts, compared to water’s 1.23 volts per cell), which means they could use metallic materials that have a greater energy density than zinc. Fluidic Energy is also reportedly tackling the problem of dendrite buildup, which faces most rechargeable batteries resulting in decreased lifetimes, by engineering a porous electrode scaffold (down to 10 nanometers). The biggest challenge for Friesen and his team will be finding an inexpensive ionic liquid that works well. No one has yet revealed what that particular ionic liquid might be, or whether the dendrite buildup problem has been solved.

 

Fluidic Energy was one of 37 entities to receive a total of $151 million in funding from ARPA-E, an energy agency modeled along the lines of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which created ARPANET, the forerunner of today’s Internet.

 

A typical example of a metal-air battery is the zinc-air cell used in hearing aid batteries. The one problem of metal-air batteries is their low power density, so recent experiments with lithium-air, carbon-air and zinc-air batteries are currently being conducted (by New York-based Yardney Technical Products, Berkeley, California-based Polyplus, the UK’s St. Andrews University and Auburn, Alabama-based Electric Fuel Battery Corp., respectively).

 

Of course, Fluidic Energy doesn’t have an actual battery yet, not even a prototype. But $5.13 million and ARPA-E backing go a long way toward R&D in what is one of the most important aspects of energy technology and emissions reductions ever to face the nation, and the world; the development of a viable electric vehicle that doesn’t need recharging stations sited all over the country like service stations. We already have enough of those.