Turning liquor waste into power: Baijiu sediment transformed into anode for sodium-ion batteries

A small team of materials engineers at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, working with Wuliangye, a manufacturer of baijiu, has developed a carbon-source anode using baijiu sediment for use in a sodium-ion battery. In their study published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, the group treated the sediment to make it useful as an anode.

Baijiu is an alcoholic beverage that is popular in China. It is made from wheat or rice and has a high alcohol content. The researchers noted that sediment left over from the distillation process, which is normally sold as a fertilizer or livestock feed base, has ingredients that could be used to make a carbon anode.

Over the past several years, lithium-ion batteries have become the standard for use in handheld devices and for larger applications such as backing up solar power installations and even powering electric cars. Unfortunately, such batteries are costly and represent a fire risk, and scientists have been looking for a replacement.

One such possibility is the sodium-ion battery. To make it a viable alternative, scientists need to find a way to improve its charge density and thus its efficiency, and also to address micropore collapse of the carbon in the anode. In this new effort, the research team has addressed the latter issue.

Making a carbon-based anode suitable for use in a sodium-ion battery from baijiu sediment required significant treatment. They started by washing and drying it and then subjecting it to acid leaching and pre-carbonizing. Next, to get rid of the silica, they soaked it in sodium hydroxide at a high temperature and mixed it with ethyl orthosilicate. The final steps were blasting it with ultrasound and baking it in an oven. The result was a silicon-doped hard carbon. The research team calls it HC-1100Si-1.

Once their anode was complete, the team put it in a standard sodium-ion battery to see how well it worked. They found it had a reversible capacity of 281.5 mAh/g at 1°C and held onto 91.9% of its charge capacity after 100 cycles. This is not as good as batteries currently in use, the team acknowledges, but they believe it could be used in applications that involve frequent charging.

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