The Aluminum-Ion Battery: A Sustainable and Seminal Concept?

The expansion of renewable energy and the growing number of electric vehicles and mobile devices are demanding improved and low-cost electrochemical energy storage. In order to meet the future needs for energy storage, novel material systems with high energy densities, readily available raw materials, and safety are required. Currently, lithium and lead mainly dominate the battery market, but apart from cobalt and phosphorous, lithium may show substantial supply challenges prospectively, as well.

Sulfur- and Selenium-Containing Compounds Potentially Exhibiting Al Ion Conductivity.

We have created a set of crystalline model structures exhibiting straight lines of Al connected to chalcogenides (O , S , and Se ) connected to metal cations of varying valence (Sr , Y , Zr , Nb , and Mo ). They were relaxed with density functional theory computations and analysed by Bader partitioning. As Al ions are supposed to strongly interact with their atomic environment, we studied the electron density topology induced by higher-valent cations in the extended chemical neighbourhood of Al.

On the Way to New Possible Na-Ion Conductors: The Voronoi-Dirichlet Approach, Data Mining and Symmetry Considerations in Ternary Na Oxides.

With the constant growth of the lithium battery market and the introduction of electric vehicles and stationary energy storage solutions, the low abundance and high price of lithium will greatly impact its availability in the future. Thus, a diversification of electrochemical energy storage technologies based on other source materials is of great relevance. Sodium is energetically similar to lithium but cheaper and more abundant, which results in some already established stationary concepts, such as Na-S and ZEBRA cells.

Printing nearly-discrete magnetic patterns using chemical disorder induced ferromagnetism.

Ferromagnetism in certain alloys consisting of magnetic and nonmagnetic species can be activated by the presence of chemical disorder. This phenomenon is linked to an increase in the number of nearest-neighbor magnetic atoms and local variations in the electronic band structure due to the existence of disorder sites. An approach to induce disorder is through exposure of the chemically ordered alloy to energetic ions; collision cascades formed by the ions knock atoms from their ordered sites and the concomitant vacancies are filled randomly via thermal diffusion of atoms at room temperature.