Special batteries can provide the desired power

Researchers have created a new synthetic material that can be used to make a special battery that can store solar energy and emit it at any time at the desired amount.

Developing countries are places that the Sun shines a lot during the daytime. However, here, solar energy is rarely exploited and no cheap energy storage devices can be saved for evening use.

As a result, dinners here are often cooked with charcoal, wood, and gas while solar energy is only used to provide electricity during the day. This makes the efforts of disseminating solar energy meaningless.

Dr. Grace Han is holding the new chemical material used to store heat energy very efficiently.(Photo: Melanie Gonick / MIT).

But recently, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new synthetic chemical material. This material can be used to store solar energy obtained during the day into a type of heat battery, and release the energy when needed. This battery can be used to cook or boil water in the evening.

The energy storage of this type of battery is the use of a state-changing material (PCM): when the heat source is introduced, it will heat the material and will deform from solid to liquid to save energy. quantity. When the PCM material is cooled down to the melting point, it becomes a solid object, at which time the stored energy will be released as heat.

There are many other substances that are also state-changing materials , such as wax or fatty acid used in low temperature reactions, or molten salts used in high temperature reactions. However, all PCM materials now need an insulation around, because materials that change status uncontrollably lose heat relatively quickly.

Instead, researchers' new materials use a molecular change kit, which will change shape when reacting to light. When integrated into a PCM material , the temperature causes a change of state to be replaced by light, which helps the material to move to a state at a lower temperature than the initial melting temperature.

The process of changing the state of matter from solid to liquid to absorb heat and from liquid to solid to release energy.(Photo: MIT).

The study was conducted by Dr. Grace Han and Huashan Li and Professor Jeffrey Grossman, published in Nature Communications.

'The difficulty with thermal battery materials is that high temperatures make them change too quickly in an uncontrolled way. So our team changed the molecular structure so that they were only affected by light, not high temperatures, so that it could store batteries or release energy by activating the light source, ' Grossman explain.

To create this new material, the researchers combined fatty acids with an organic compound, helping it respond to the interaction of light. By this combination, the light-sensitive components will change the thermal contact properties of other components in the matter, making the whole block able to interact with light.

This new material can absorb heat from any heat source but not necessarily from the Sun.'Heat sources are always available around us. The purpose of this study is to use heat from the industrial process, from traffic on the road . to avoid wasting them , "said Dr. Han.

This battery can store energy for 10 hours, compared to similarly sized devices, it only saves a few minutes. In addition, the energy storage density is also very large. The lowest temperature that the device can still withstand to keep the heat inside is 10 degrees C.

This new product is being noticed by investors in India. This billion-dollar country is a place close to the equator, receiving a lot of sunlight and has long been famous for the high rate of solar use in households. Researchers are currently working on completing this commercial product soon.