Simple electrode assembly engineering: Toward a multifunctional lead-acid battery

Abstract

Electrochemical energy storage is a promising technology for the integration of renewable energy. Lead-acid battery is perhaps among the most successful commercialized systems ever since thanks to its excellent cost-effectiveness and safety records. Despite of 165 years of development, the low energy density as well as the coupled power and energy density scaling restrain its wider application in real life. To address this challenge, we optimized the configuration of conventional Pb-acid battery to integrate two gas diffusion electrodes. The novel device can work as a Pb-air battery using ambient air, showing a peak power density of 183 mW cm−2, which was comparable with other state-of-the-art metal-O2 batteries. It can also behave as a fuel cell, simultaneously converting H2 and air into electricity with a peak power density of 75 mW cm−2. Importantly, this device showed little performance degradation after 35 h of the longevity test. Our work shows the exciting potential of lead battery technology and demonstrates the importance of battery architecture optimization toward improved energy storage capacity.