User talk:Christian
Thoughts about an open source Battery
Before joining OSE, I was interested in the concept of an open source battery, so I tested the Edison battery, and realized that this is a quite complicated process... There are several possibilities to get to it and it is working, but to get only the slightest use out of it you have to go through more complicated processes than simply putting to metals into KOH. Thats why I landed on the german site of OSE wiki and found that they had a different approach that looked far more promising, because the main process could be made much simpler and even cheaper: the Zinc Air Battery. The main problem of this system is keeping the zinc apart from the KOH for reloading the battery properly. Additionaly, the battery feeds on Oxygen on one site, but the KOH reacts to Carbondioxide, which takes away its properties as an electrolyte. All these problems have been thought about by them, however, one link of an experiment draw my attention to be the most promising way to approach the problems:
This 'battery' structure is so damn simple, so small and yet so powerful (0,5 Wh in one syringe, without any optimization!), that I started calculating around the possibilities of this batteries and their flaws on a large scale. On the theoretical basis, there is only one serious problem, and that is the amount of oxygen that has to be saved. For 10 KWh, there has to be an either 4 or 2 m² (70-140 f³; unsure about the calculation) big tank for pure oxygen! That would take one main advantage, the energy density. However, this may not be the main goal of this project (as saving solar energy isnt normally on space). The Advantages however are enormous, starting with a theoretical even higher lonevity than even the edison batteries (in theory, the only thing that can break over time here is the casing...), an even cheaper production (no iron required, no nickel, which costs the doubled amount of zinc, but only has a fraction of the density). Its even a little bit more enviroment friendly, as zinc is not as poisoneous as nickel.
I will probably research with a bit of experimenting in later summer with a befriended chemistry student, I've collected what there is to do and important information in a google doc found here
