All Charged Up: Engineers Create A Battery Made Of Wood

Linky

Now this is interesting.
A battery made from wood coated with carbon nanotubes using sodium.
Everything there is very cheap to get. I'll be it's easy to make and very renewable.
I hope this gets some traction and is a good alternative to Li-Ion batteries.

I really wasn't sure what a wood battery would look like. I knew you could make a battery out of a potato and wires, so I figured maybe they were doing something similar with a block of wood.

Wrong. The "wood" is actually microscopic wood fibers that are fashioned into thin sheets. The sheets are then coated with carbon nanotubes and packed into small metal discs.

The wood batteries use sodium ions, rather than the lithium ions that are found in the batteries of cellphones and laptops. In this case, the charged particles move around in the wood fibers, creating an electric current. It turns out wood is a good medium for sodium ions to move around in.

Now, wood is comparatively cheap. So is sodium. Liangbing Hu, head of the battery project, says he's hoping the new batteries can be scaled up so they'll be useful for storing the vast amounts of energy generated by solar arrays or wind farms.

reply to post by grey580


That's very interesting... I too am hoping these can be scaled up. Inexpensive raw materials, not to mention they should be easy to dispose of when depleted. If it is viable it seems too good to be true.

reply to post by grey580

I searched:

wood battery

This thread about a month old was literally the very first result on the search:
Researchers create super-efficient, long-lasting battery from wood