Then they can no longer be used to generate electricity, the capacity of the battery decreases. “In many batteries, you have the problem that at some point the charge carriers can no longer move. Perhaps the most important advantage of the new battery technology is its potential longevity. Cobalt or nickel, which are used in many batteries, are not used at all. However, lanthanum can be replaced by something cheaper, and research into this is already underway. The prototype of the battery still uses lanthanum - an element that is not exactly rare but not completely common either. Tobias Huber said that the use of ceramic materials is also advantageous because they can be adapted very well certain elements that are difficult to obtain can also be replaced with others relatively easily. In addition, there is no need for rare elements, which are expensive or can only be extracted in an environmentally harmful way. Professor Jürgen Fleig said the basic principle is very similar to the lithium-ion battery, but the oxygen-ion battery’s materials have some advantages.Ĭeramics are not flammable - so fire accidents, which can occur with lithium-ion batteries, are practically ruled out. When an electric voltage is applied, the oxygen ions migrate from one ceramic material to another, after which they can be made to migrate back again, thus generating electric current. The ceramic materials that the TU Wein team studied can absorb and release doubly negatively charged oxygen ions. That gave us the idea of investigating whether such materials might also be suitable for making a battery,” said Alexander Schmid from the Institute for Chemical Technologies and Analytics at TU Wein. “We have had a lot of experience with ceramic materials that can be used for fuel cells for quite some time. The oxygen-ion battery could provide a solution for large energy storage systems, for example to store electrical energy from renewable resources. A patent application for the new battery idea has already been filed together with cooperation partners from Spain.

Oxygen-ion batteries can also be reproduced without rare elements and are made of incombustible materials. It can be regenerated and thus may enable a long service life. TU Wein has developed an oxygen-ion battery that has some advantages although it does not allow for quite as high energy densities as the lithium-ion battery, its storage capacity does not decrease irrevocably over time. However, they are not always the best solution for all areas of application. Lithium-ion batteries are ubiquitous, from electric cars to smartphones.

Oxygen charge of ion