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Making high-performance batteries from junkyard scraps

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,’ said Cary Pint, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University. To make such a future possible, Pint headed a research team that 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.”

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