What comes to your mind when we say “salt”? Probably sodium chloride. We bet you never imagined salt as a battery.
Then let’s meet with nano-coated salt technology.
This technology has been developed by Swedish innovation company- SaltX.
Although we use renewable energy sources to solve the problem of global warming, energy storage still emerges as the biggest challenge. That’s why they decided to store energy in salt. It takes renewable energy, stores it and delivers the steam when needed.
The main principle of the system is charging and discharging the energy using salt. To charge the system up electrical energy from renewable sources or waste heat generated by the industry is run through the calcium hydroxide to increase its temperature to about 500 degrees Celsius. It causes it to dehydrate. The released steam is then captured in a separate storage tank. At the end of the process, calcium oxide is left. Then when you want to release energy, you add the water back into the calcium oxide which causes a reverse reaction transforming the calcium oxide back into the calcium hydroxide. This is the exothermic reaction, so a bunch of heat energy is released in the form of steam as a result. Because the SaltX pre-coat their salt with a special nanomaterial the congealing process helps to use the system up to a thousand times without an energy loss. Furthermore, the coating makes the salt non-corrosive as well. So it can be used in any application. Through electricity, the salt is heated up and dried, then water is applied to get the energy out. The energy density of the salt is higher than the lithium-ion batteries.
This technology is very promising for the future.