Harvard Makes An Eco-Friendly, Renewable Battery Than Can Run For 10 Years Straight

Stop stressing about your constantly draining phone battery for one second, and let’s appreciate what the good guys at Harvard have accomplished here.

Researchers at Harvard have built a ‘flow’ battery that’s capable of lasting for up to 10 years, and it can even power your house for that duration. This is a milestone in the field of electric storage units which traditionally don’t have a great track record in terms of longevity.

All that’s history, though, with researchers from Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences (SEAS) developing this breakthrough in flow battery. What’s a a flow battery? It’s a battery that stores energy in liquid form, but they modified the electrolyte inside the battery in a way that it’s water-soluble, stable and not prone to degradation.

Degradation of battery is the biggest cause of us throwing batteries away, sooner rather than later. But a flow battery can achieve only one percent loss of capacity every 1,000 recharge cycles by ensuring its electrolyte is dissolved in neutral water.

The ensures the flow battery to last for a decade without any noticeable dip in performance. Let’s hope the time from prototype to production unit isn’t too long for this Harvard flow battery breakthrough, and there are real-world deployments of this technology in homes and businesses very soon.

Source:indiatimes