There’s a new type of battery that’s going to be in our stores real soon. It works like a lithium-ion battery, except it can’t catch fire. So let’s find out what’s happening inside that sodium-ion battery!
A Partnership Inside a Sodium-Ion Battery
Let’s imagine a sodium-ion battery as two school classrooms with outside windows, with a hallway between them. The students are the sodium ions, while the hallway is the electrolyte. A teacher stands at the entrance to the hallway making sure the students behave.
What Happens When We Charge a Sodium-Ion Cell?
When we charge a battery cell, it’s like someone tells qualifying ‘students‘ to leave the positive classroom, and walk through the hallway to the negative one. But they forget to take their schoolbooks with them! The hallway is congested. What happens now?
The Flow of Electrons Happening in Parallel
The ‘schoolbooks’, that we’ll call electrons, leave the positive classroom by the only other route, the outside window. They find their way through the negative classroom window so the changeover is complete.
What Happens When We Use a Sodium-Ion Battery?
When we switch on a device with a sodium-ion battery, the ‘student’ ions start moving back to the positive classroom, that’s actually the other electrode. But the electrons have to use the ‘windows’ again, because the hall is full of students. So now we know what’s happening inside that sodium-ion battery!
The ‘Classroom Monitor’ That Controls the Students
We’re sure you remember from your schooldays how students can be an unruly lot! That’s why we had classroom monitors to help manage them. Well sodium-ion batteries have separator ‘monitors’ to make sure that only ‘qualifying students’ move between classrooms.
To complete the analogy, some ‘students’ take the opportunity to play truant. That’s how sodium-ion batteries gradually lose some of their ions. We hope this analogy that we cobbled together, helps you understand what’s happening inside that sodium-ion battery.
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