There seems to be a gusher of interest in making wooden batteries. Last year, there was news from a joint Polish-Swedish research team (my Aug. 14, 2012 posting) who’d combined lignin with a conductive polymer (polypyrrole) to create a battery cathode. Today, June 19, 2013, Nanowerk featured a news item about a team at the University of Maryland (US) who are also using wood to make battery components (Note: A link has been removed),

A sliver of wood coated with tin could make a tiny, long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly battery (“Tin Anode for Sodium-Ion Batteries Using Natural Wood Fiber as a Mechanical Buffer and Electrolyte Reservoir”).

But don’t try it at home yet– the components in the battery tested by scientists at the University of Maryland are a thousand times thinner than a piece of paper. Using sodium instead of lithium, as many rechargeable batteries do, makes the battery environmentally benign. Sodium doesn’t store energy as efficiently as lithium, so you won’t see this battery in your cell phone — instead, its low cost and common materials would make it ideal to store huge amounts of energy at once – such as solar energy at a power plant.

The June 19, 2013 University of Maryland news release, which originated the news item, explains why this work with wood is so exciting (Note: Links have been removed),

Existing batteries are often created on stiff bases, which are too brittle to withstand the swelling and shrinking that happens as electrons are stored in and used up from the battery. Liangbing Hu, Teng Li and their team found that wood fibers are supple enough to let their sodium-ion battery last more than 400 charging cycles, which puts it among the longest lasting nanobatteries.

“The inspiration behind the idea comes from the trees,” said Hu, an assistant professor of materials science. “Wood fibers that make up a tree once held mineral-rich water, and so are ideal for storing liquid electrolytes, making them not only the base but an active part of the battery.”

Lead author Hongli Zhu and other team members noticed that after charging and discharging the battery hundreds of times, the wood ended up wrinkled but intact. Computer models showed that that the wrinkles effectively relax the stress in the battery during charging and recharging, so that the battery can survive many cycles.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the research paper,

Tin Anode for Sodium-Ion Batteries Using Natural Wood Fiber as a Mechanical Buffer and Electrolyte Reservoir by Hongli Zhu, Zheng Jia, Yuchen Chen, Nicholas Weadock, Jiayu Wan, Oeyvind Vaaland, Xiaogang Han, Teng Li, and Liangbing Hu. Nano Lett., Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/nl400998t Publication Date (Web): May 29, 2013

Copyright © 2013 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.