Battery technology for e-cars: what is the perfect cell?

D As is well known, the world does not always deal fairly with those who achieve important things. Johann Wilhelm Ritter would have seen it that way too, because the Silesian-born pharmacist and physicist died impoverished in Munich in 1810 at the age of just 33. Only a few years earlier he had built the first rechargeable battery, the so-called Ritter’s charge column, by stacking copper disks and pieces of cardboard soaked with saline in a glass tube. After the tube is charged, it gives off the current again, even if the charging device is removed. A state-of-the-art lithium polymer battery in a current electric car works no differently. A rechargeable battery stores electrical energy chemically and releases it again as electrical energy. With every transformation, part of the energy supplied falls by the wayside, as the laws of thermodynamics want it to be. The function of the accumulators is based on the electronegativity of metals, to put it more simply: on their ability to give off electrons.

Manufacturer

The Swiss company NanoFlowcell sees the future in flow cell technology and wants to get started with it.

One The company NanoFlowcell claims a new type of mobile application. The electrolyte liquid is evaporated and the dissolved salts are absorbed by a filter. When the supply is used up, the liquid is refilled. NanoFlowcell has already demonstrated prototypes, but so far there has been no proof of sustainable function. The perfect cell has apparently not yet been discovered here either. The search goes on, 208 years after Johann Wilhelm Ritter.