- Researchers at Indian Institute of Technology(IIT) Madras have for the first time fabricated a rechargeable iron ion battery using mild steel as the anode.
- Currently,lithium-ion batteries are widely in use.However,the lithium reserves are limited when compared to iron reserves and hence the invention assume significance.
- Further,this invention comes at a time when the world is moving towards adopting electric vehicles which need cheaper batteries.
- The iron ion battery are also cost-effective and the amount of energy that can be stored in the battery is also high.
- Researchers have also demonstrated the performance of iron ions battery for 150 cycles of charging and discharging.It has displayed good stability with 54% capacity retention at the end of 50 cycles.
- In Iron ion battery,vanadium pentoxide is used as the cathode.Vanadium pentoxide was chosen as it has a layered structure with very large spacing between the layers.
- There are various benefits of iron over Lithium such as (a)Iron has favourable physico-chemical properties like lithium (b)The redox potential of iron ion is higher than lithium ion and (c)Iron is more stable during the charging process and therefore prevents short-circuiting of the batteries.
