Rust has a surprising use in energy storage. Iron is one of the most important metals in the world. It’s strong, lightweight and malleable, making it a great material for many objects from gigantic bridges to nuts and bolts. The Achilles heel of the metal is its susceptibility to corrosion.
It works as a “reversible rust battery,” which means that while discharging, the battery breathes in oxygen from the air and converts metallic iron to rust. While charging, with the application of an electrical current, the battery converts “rust” back into metallic iron and breathes out oxygen. Here’s a deeper look at the battery cycle.
Form Energy’s battery stores electricity through a reversible rusting cycle in every cell. Each cell contains an electrolyte solution, similar to that in AA batteries, and two plates: an anode made of iron pellets and an air-breathing cathode. This setup allows an electrochemical redox reaction to happen.
While charging, an electrical current converts the rust back to iron and the battery breathes out oxygen. Since its founding, the company has raised $832 million from investors, including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and ArcelorMittal SA, a Luxembourg-based multinational steel company.
Using a principle called “reverse rusting,” the cells “breathe” in air, which transforms the iron into iron oxide (aka rust) and produces energy. To charge it back up, a current reverses the oxidation and turns the cells back into iron.
This turns the coating of the metal into rust (iron oxide). Then to recharge, the air electrode consumes hydroxide ions to form fizzy oxygen bubbles on charge, when the direction is reversed. Then the rust is converted back to iron metal.
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The electrochemical reaction simply deposits rust on the surface of the iron electrode, which means that the only limiting factor is the surface area of the electrode. As a result, the mass requirements of the battery is greatly reduced, leading to a much higher theoretical energy density.
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What Form Energy is doing is to use the electricity produced by a renewable to remove oxygen from rusted pellets of iron (it takes energy to do that, that''s why you won''t see a rusted bar go back to a shining state) and then use that oxygen to generate power on demand.
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