A surprising breakthrough could help sodium-ion batteries rival lithium—and even turn seawater into drinking water. Scientists discovered that keeping water inside a key battery material, instead of removing it as traditionally done, dramatically boosts performance. The “wet” version stores nearly twice as much charge, charges faster, and remains stable for hundreds of cycles, placing it among the top-performing sodium battery materials ever reported.
We hear about a new battery chemistry like every week. Do most never get to commercialization?
They mostly these articles are showing new avenues for research. Most are deadends usually due to issues with production/scalability.
Sodium Ions batteries are coming to market, however the issue is that Lithium Ion are just improving faster and making it harder for Sodium Ion batteries to compete.
Unless other situations where the established technology wins due to inertia, sodium ion batteries have two benefits that make them interesting regardless:
Firstly, they are safer. A punctured sodium ion battery doesn’t catch fire, which massively simplifies safety design. That makes them very attractive for certain scenarios, especially ones where density is a secondary concern. That in turn means they get further development money instead of withering on the vine.
Secondly, they require fewer hard-to-obtain materials, which makes them attractive from a strategic perspective. This one should be less important than the safety factor but it’s also relevant.
I’m pretty sure we’ll actually see wet sodium cells in the wild if they are actually practical. Sodium ion tech is already being commercialized and if this brings it within the same ballpark as lithium ion then it becomes a very interesting choice for vehicles due to instant crash safety gains.
They also perform better in the cold making them a better choice for EVs in cold regions. This is why I think CATL saw the videos of cars getting killed by cold and pulled the trigger on retooling even with the lithium price crash.
The harder to obtain materials aspect, while long term relevant, is barely a factor right now. Lithium production has exploded and resulted in a massive drop in prices that’s making the main consumer appeal for sodium batteries, price, a non-factor and driving some sodium battery producers out of business
R&d on these I’m guessing takes a little while. And it greatly depends on what niche they fill. Like the poster above said these might have lower density. For applications that move, that’s not usually good. How sensitive are they to hot and cold? That could necessitate thermal management.
Its that way with many technologies. The lead time on such research is long enough that market factors alter the viability by the time it is ready to get commercialized.
Quite often innovations from prototype technology can be transplanted into existing tech for part of the benefit, without having to build new production capacity. So the new technology does not commercialised, but the learnings from it does.