Although solar cells produce an increasing proportion of total electricity, there remains a fundamental limitation of its use: the dark of night, solar cells stop working. The lithium-ion batteries, commonly used in almost anything from laptops to hybrid vehicles are too expensive to be used in something as huge as the electricity grid solution.
The team of Song Jin, a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, has a better idea: integrated solar cell with a high capacity battery. He and his colleagues have built a unique device that eliminates the usual intermediate step of making electricity, and instead, transfers the energy directly to the battery electrolyte.
Jin chose a battery redox flow, or RFB (for short), which stores energy in a tank of liquid electrolyte.
Jin Wenjie Li from the same university, and colleagues at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, have shown the amazing device that converts light energy into chemical to electrically charge the liquid electrolyte directly energy. The transfer to the mains at night energy stored by a battery based on this concept could hardly be simpler.
Solar recharging electric shock and may be repeated for many cycles with little loss of efficiency.
Unlike lithium-ion batteries, which store energy in solid electrodes, the RFB chemical energy stored in liquid electrolyte. RFB is relatively inexpensive and it is possible to build unlimited scale, thus allowing each RFB has all the storage capacity needed. This makes it one of the most promising for storing electricity to the large scale demanded by a typical utility grid options.
In the new device there are solar cells installed normal silicon on the reaction chamber. And the energy converted by the load cell immediately electrolyte, based on water, which is pumped to a storage tank.
