Liquid Metal Battery finally gets it’s first CEO, Phil Giudice. LMB is a company that works on creating cheap storage solutions for energy that is produced from alternate energy sources. A brain child of Donald Sadoway, the company has received funds from Bill Gates.
Effective and cheap power storage:
Liquid Metal Battery was founded by Donald Sadoway. Donald is a professor of materials chemistry at MIT. He invented the concept and uploaded his lectures about it on the internet. Bill Gates chanced upon these lectures and was impressed. So he decided to fund the venture. Part of the funding for the company has also come from Total, the oil giant. The concept Donald has proposed is that power can be stored in a way lot cheaper than the prevalent ways. In fact, the company has claimed that it aims at creating batteries so cheap that they may cost $250 or less for one kilowatt-hour of stored power. This price-tag is quite cheap compared to the prevalent lithium ion batteries which cost more than $500 per kilowatt-hour.
The structure of the battery:
The structure which Donald devised and which he claims can be used to store energy more efficiently and cheaply, makes use of liquid metal alloys. These alloys will serve as anode, cathode and electrolyte and they can ensure that the battery is durable for a much longer time compared to lithium ion batteries. The company claims that by using this battery, the size of cells used to store power can be reduced by more than 50 times. What remains to be seen is that when exactly the company will be able to come up with a commercially-usable product.
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