The problem with electric cars has been the low life cycle of a battery charge and the time take to re-charge. It makes for really bad longer trips. Well those headaches could be a thing of the past, thanks to MIT:
A new battery design developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could transform the way electric vehicles and the power grid store and discharge energy.
The MIT News Office reported that the new architecture suspends the active electrical components of a battery, such as positive and negative electrodes, as particles in a liquid. This black electric sludge, which resembles petroleum, has been dubbed “Cambridge crude” by its inventors.
The new design, called a “semi-solid flow cell,” could allow electric vehicles to refuel by pumping the used electric sludge out and replacing it with fully charged electric sludge. Researchers say the new battery design should also make it possible to reduce the size and the cost of a complete battery system, making electric cars more competitive with contemporary gas-powered cars.
The new battery architecture is described in a paper published May 20 in the journal Advanced Energy Materials. It combined the basic structure of flow batteries with the high energy potential of lithium-ion batteries.
The potentials of this new “sludge” is really exciting. Imagine if they can harness enough power from it that eventually they could just pump it into our houses as our primary power source. That’s a possibility with this invention and proves that we still have researchers thinking “outside the box” when it comes to our future energy needs.