From Waste to Wattage: Revolutionising Energy Storage with Industrial By-products

Industrial waste, called triphenylphosphine oxide (TPO), used for redox flow batteries (made for large-scale energy storage) is a development towards sustainable battery technology. In other words, instead of banking on minerals with harmful effects for the environment, like lithium or cobalt, extracted through mining, green energy alternatives are possible. The market for redox flow batteries is likely to increase by 15 per cent from 2023 to 2030, value being about 700 million euros worldwide. Researchers at Northwestern University are working on these lines, as per a paper published this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

TPO is generated in tonnes as a chemical by-product each year by the organic industry synthesis process like making vitamins among other applications. Using a one-pot reaction, chemists can turn the industrial waste into a usable product useful to story energy: Redox flow batteries.

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Lithium and solid-state batteries store energy in electrodes. This battery energy innovation pumps energy back and forth between electrolytes, using a chemical reaction. To attain energy density and stability, the team identified a strategy to pack electrons together in the solution, without any loss of storage capacity over time. The Northwestern team observed that the battery lost little capacity over time in this experiment using phosphine oxides.

Source: SciTech Daily