Storing energy from renewable sources

One of the greatest challenges in generating energy from renewable sources is finding a way to store the continuously fluctuating energy being produced. Batteries, supercapacitors, and most other energy-storage technologies typically can't respond quickly enough to the second-by-second fluctuations inherent in wind and solar energy sources.

One device that does have a sufficiently fast response is electrostatic capacitors, but their drawback is their low energy density—they simply cannot store very much energy in a given volume. Addressing this problem, researchers in a new study have shown in simulations that antiferroelectric materials based on bismuth can potentially exhibit very high energy densities (150 J/cm3), making them a promising candidate material for electrostatic capacitors.

The results point to the possibility of a high-performance, environmentally friendly energy-storage device for renewable energy sources. The researchers, Bin Xu and Laurent Bellaiche at the University of Arkansas, and Jorge Íñiguez at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, have published a paper on their investigation of antiferroelectrics for energy storage in a recent issue of Nature Communications.

Read more at Phys.org

Image Credit: Nature Communications

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