Evan Bernstein

So I had to get that far to actually figure out what the heck are they really talking about here and why is any of this news?

It has to do with degradation reduction.

So you got these active materials that will tend to degrade and leak through the membrane in these types of batteries.

And that's a process that rapidly wears out the battery and limits its practical lifespan.

To overcome those hurdles, the Chinese team of researchers employed a synergistic design at the molecular level and engineered a specialized iron complex that serves as a double-layered defense.

It became, in their testing, 99.4% leak-proof efficiency, which is pretty high, pretty high.

Now again, as I said before, this is not new technology in of itself, the Iron Flow battery, because there are other companies that are already deploying these systems.

There's a company in Oregon called ESS.

They are doing one for Google, for example.

But their designs struggle with what they call dendrites.

which are tiny needle-like crystals that can short-circuit the battery.

The Chinese team believes they have leapfrogged that hurdle by using an alkaline-based chemistry and their new molecular shield, as they're calling it.

So they developed an iron molecule that uses its rigid, bulky structure to physically shield the iron core from chemical attack, while its strong negative charge creates a force field, as they describe it, that repels leaking particles.

Okay, so that's really the core of what's going on here.

They tweaked the chemistry to make it more stable.

That's right.

Just realize on the tank at that, the tank size at that point.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yep.