Acer TM5720 Battery

Air can actually be electric, and not just in that moment when you pop your collar after a Phil Collins tune comes booming out of your Ferrari’s speakers. Zinc-air batteries, which are about the size of Smarties candies and powered by the reaction between oxygen and zinc, have been used in hearing aids for many years. Zinc is also cheap and abundant, making the technology economical as well as eco-friendly.
But there are limitations when trying to make this tech rechargeable. Dendrite crystals can form during charging and short out the battery. Ways have been tested to replace the zinc such as “mechanically recharging” the battery by physically replacing the materials, an approach that has been tried in Singapore’s electric buses. Numerous other experiments have been attempted with lithium-air and metal-air batteries with varying degrees of energy density, power level, and cost. Over the past decade, Tesla has filed several patents related to charging lithium-air batteries, so their potential may exist far beyond your hearing aids.
A few years ago, University of Idaho chemistry professor Peter Allen started expressing his fascination with battery science on YouTube. Almost immediately he found that viewers really respond to battery material, which inspired him to build a rechargeable iron battery as an educational demonstration. That project has led to more than 100 demonstration videos explaining the steps, problems, and learnings of an educational battery project.
“I don’t want to pitch myself as a battery expert, per se,” acknowledges the professor, whose area of expertise is biological chemistry.
In doing the YouTube videos, he realized that there was a lot to be taught and learned by building a relatively cheap do-it-yourself battery.
“Parts of the iron battery technology have been around for 100 years, so I think a lot of folks who might come into this with a lot of foreign knowledge would just say, ‘Well, that’s that’s trodden ground — there’s nothing to be found there,’” he says. “But being a little naive, I walked into it and said, ‘Well, let’s try it, you can find something interesting anyway.’”
After two years, more than 30 battery variations, and a lot of help from undergraduate students, Allen has learned how to balance the liquid and solid materials to create an optimal amount of energy density but with low power.
“Then we got into this whole question of: ‘If you have a chemistry that works, but works slowly, how do you speed it up?’”
Even if the team solves that challenge, current technology dictates that the best applications for an iron battery will likely be a neighborhood microgrid energy storage unit or solar farm power capture, given the space required and the speed of energy sent from the unit.
Will Allen’s iron battery ever be commercially viable? He isn’t sure that he team’s current findings, which have been published in a scientific journal, will get them there.
Having reviewed numerous battery inventions, he realizes only a few of them will actually make it to market. In scientific research, he explains, there’s a “valley of death.”
“You have the basic research that comes up with something really cool,” he says. “There’s a question of whether it can be commercialized. And there’s no money to ask that question.” Researchers who find enough money to answer that initial question will then, if they’re lucky, find investors who want to refine and commercialize the idea. “But there’s a gap between the basic research and necessary refining to make a battery commercial.”
In 2019, venture capitalists sunk $1.7 billion into battery startups, with 1.4 billion of it going to lithium-ion related research. But flow batteries, zinc-air, liquid metal, and many other technologies also got written checks. While lithium-ion energy storage will likely dominate energy storage for at least another 10 years, many others already look like they’ll power their way out of the valley of death.

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