Sam Evans
speaker
11,513 appearances
100 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 17 Aug
Sam Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 100 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 32.
Appearances
The results were just published in the journal Nature Energy.
Now, flow batteries are not new.
They typically work by pumping liquid electrolytes through an electrochemical cell
But zinc-based flow batteries have always had a problem.
The fixed zinc electrode degrades over time.
Zinc particles clump together, reactions become unstable, and then the interface breaks down.
The team threw out the fixed electrode entirely.
Instead, they turn zinc itself into a flowable energy carrier, a slurry of zinc nanoparticles suspended in a conductive liquid that continuously circulates between a storage tank and the battery cell, while the zinc reversibly switches between its metallic and ionic forms.
The senior author, Fei Wang, said the idea came from visiting a zinc electro winning plant, watching the industrial process where zinc ions are converted into metallic zinc, and realizing that same electron gaining process could be used directly for energy storage.
The design combines nanoscale zinc particles with a hollow carbon framework and a ligand controlled electrolyte, which together stop the particles from clumping and keep the reaction stable through repeated charging and discharging.
And the numbers are actually genuinely impressive.
In laboratory testing, the system achieved an efficiency of 99.94%.
Zinc manganese dioxide batteries built on the same architecture retained 81.1% of their original capacity after 5,500 discharge cycles.
That's better than lithium-ion phosphate.
I mean, that's 5,500 cycles.
The latest lithium-ion phosphate batteries are rated to achieve 80% of their original capacity after around 4,000 cycles.
And as I said earlier, the system ran continuously for 5,128 hours.
That's a lot of time to run a battery continuously.
Here's why this matters so much for renewables.
matched
On the Electric Viking website, I'll put a link in the description below, we have more articles about electric cars and battery technology than any other website that I'm aware of in the world.
matched
Showing 3561–3580 of 11,513 · page 179 of 576
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