Technology Review: Betting on a Metal-Air Battery Breakthrough: "A spinoff from Arizona State University says it can develop a metal-air battery that dramatically outperforms the best lithium-ion batteries on the market, and now it has the funding it needs to prove it.
Liquid salt: This image shows ionic liquids (the blue globules) in a beaker of mineral oil.
Credit: John Wilkes
The U.S. Department of Energy last week awarded a $5.13-million research grant to Scottsdale, AZ-based Fluidic Energy toward development of a metal-air battery that relies on ionic liquids, instead of an aqueous solution, as its electrolyte.
The company aims to build a Metal-Air Ionic Liquid battery that has up to 11 times the energy density of the top lithium-ion technologies for less than one-third the cost. Cody Friesen, a professor of materials science at Arizona State and founder of Fluidic Energy, says the use of ionic liquids overcomes many of the problems that have held back metal-air batteries in the past. 'I'm not claiming we have it yet, but if we do succeed, it really does change the way we think about storage,' says Friesen, who was named one of Technology Review's top innovators under 35 in 2009."
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