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Take some metal scraps from the junkyard, put them in a glass jar with a common household chemical and, voilà, you have a high-performance battery. Imagine that the tons of metal waste discarded every year could be used to provide energy storage for the renewable energy grid of the future, instead of becoming a burden for waste processing plants and the environment.
To make such a future possible, National Science Foundation-funded researchers at Vanderbilt University used scraps of steel and brass--two of the most commonly discarded materials--to create the world’s first steel-brass battery that can store energy at levels comparable to lead-acid batteries while charging and discharging at rates comparable to ultra-fast charging supercapacitors.Image credit: Daniel Dubois / Vanderbilt University
