"With hydrogen production, the battolyser adds multi-day and even inter-seasonal energy storage."īesides creating hydrogen, nickel-iron batteries have other useful traits, first and foremost that they are unusually low-maintenance. " are resilient, being able to withstand undercharging and overcharging better than other batteries," says John Barton, a research associate at the School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering, Loughborough University in the UK, who also researches battolysers. The nickel-iron battolyser, on the other hand remains stable when fully charged, at which point it can transition to making hydrogen instead. With solar, for example, you have a surplus of energy produced during the daytime and summertime, but at night and in the winter months, the supply dwindles.Ĭonventional batteries, such as those based on lithium, can store energy in the short-term, but when they’re fully charged they have to release any excess or they could overheat and degrade. One of the biggest challenges of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar is how unpredictable and intermittent they can be. "There's always been a kind of competition between those two sets of directions, but you basically need both." "You'll hear all these discussions about batteries on the one hand and hydrogen on the other hand," says Mulder. Mulder dubbed their creation the "battolyser", and they hope their discovery can help solve two major challenges for renewable energy: energy storage and, when the batteries are full, production of clean fuel. Also, when it was being charged, it would release hydrogen, which was considered a nuisance and could be dangerous. It was larger than the more widely used lead-acid batteries, and more expensive. He even had a deal in place with Ford Motors to produce this purportedly more efficient electric vehicle.īut the nickel-iron battery did have some kinks to work out. Building on the work of the Swedish inventor Ernst Waldemar Jungner, who first patented a nickel-iron battery in 1899, Edison sought to refine the battery for use in automobiles.Įdison claimed the nickel-iron battery was incredibly resilient, and could be charged twice as fast as lead-acid batteries. Edison had outfitted his car with a new type of battery that he hoped would soon be powering vehicles throughout the country: a nickel-iron battery. While electric cars weren't a novelty in the neighborhood, most of them relied on heavy and cumbersome lead-acid batteries.
FIELDLINES EDISON BATTERY DRIVER
It was the early 1900s, and the driver of this particular car was Thomas Edison. It travelled at twice the speed of the more conventional vehicles it overtook, stirring up dust that perhaps tickled the noses of the horses pulling carriages steadily along the street. Traveling down a gravelly road in West Orange, New Jersey, an electric car sped by pedestrians, some clearly surprised by the vehicle's roomy interior.
0 kommentar(er)
