Chinalco's Aluminum Air Cell products debut at Shanghai Aluminum Industry Exhibition-Chinalco Group breaks through the Technical bottleneck of Aluminum fuel Cell industrialization

SMM News: July 10 this year's China International Aluminum Industry Exhibition for the first time released three products: aluminum fuel communication backup power supply, portable aluminum fuel emergency power supply, hydropower and heat integrated aluminum fuel emergency support equipment. The three products respond to the strategic needs of national energy, meet the urgent needs of military and civilian emergency and standby areas, and lead the battery performance, causing a huge response in the metal air battery industry.

With the rapid development of 5G mobile communication technology, the development of human society is more and more dependent on power energy, and human social activities have higher and higher requirements for power supply and economy. However, the existing fuel generator sets and all kinds of chemical power supply (such as lead-acid battery, lithium-ion battery, hydrogen fuel cell, etc.) are difficult to fully meet the diversified needs of power supply, such as safety, economy and long service life. Especially in the emergency power environmental pollution, major disasters hydropower and thermal emergency protection, power battery life is short, wartime power supply safety and strategic alternative energy and other military and civilian pain point problems, the traditional energy system is difficult to provide appropriate power solutions.

/ Energy storage device. It has the advantages of high specific energy density, low cost, high safety, low thermal radiation, low noise, long storage time, long discharge life, wide temperature range, rich resources and no pollution. In particular, the specific energy density is much higher than other traditional batteries, in which the theoretical energy density of aluminum can reach 8140 watt-hours / kg, which is dozens of times that of the current commercial lithium-ion battery. therefore, it is called "green energy for the 21st century".

The 13th five-year Plan for the Development of Strategic emerging Industries has also been included in the Action Plan for Innovation in Energy Technology Revolution (2016-2030). It is expected to achieve large-scale applications in the fields of electric vehicles, smart microgrid, communication base stations and emergency disaster relief.

It was funded in March 2019. In close cooperation with the Southeast Branch of the Academia Sinica, the Ningbo Institute of Materials of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the graphene Manufacturing Innovation Center of Zhejiang Province, the company has graphene air electrode technology, aluminum anode technology, power supply and system integrated control technology to carry out the industrialization and commercialization of high performance graphene-based aluminum fuel cell technology. The purpose of this paper is to realize the demonstration operation and scale application of aluminum fuel power supply system in the fields of communication base station, emergency disaster relief and military emergency support energy.

In the process of research and development, the technical team has broken through many technical bottlenecks of aluminum fuel cell, such as low activity of oxygen catalyst, large air cathodic polarization resistance, serious self-corrosion of aluminum anode, heat out of control and difficult to start again. In the preparation of aluminum alloy electrode, a new design idea of multiple alloying combined with microstructure control is put forward, which reduces the self-corrosion rate, improves the electronegativity of the electrochemical corrosion potential of aluminum electrode, and greatly improves the fuel utilization efficiency of aluminum anode. In the preparation of air cathode, we make full use of the advantages of graphene material, such as conductivity, heat conduction and synergistic catalysis, greatly reduce the ohmic polarization resistance and reaction overpotential of the cell, and significantly improve the power output performance of the cell. In the structural design of the battery stack module, the integrated technology of heat sink and collector is skillfully adopted to overcome the problem of thermal escape in the practical process of aluminum fuel cell. In the aspect of power system integration, the architecture design of real-time multi-directional power management system for flow field, temperature field and control information flow is put forward boldly and innovatively, which breaks through the integration technology bottleneck of no-cleaning and water-free cooling system. The integration scheme is in the lead in China and is the first at home and abroad.

More than twice the performance of similar products, such as output power density, electrolyte consumption and unit aluminum alloy power generation, and has successfully developed aluminum fuel communication standby power supply, portable aluminum fuel emergency power supply and hydropower and heat integrated aluminum fuel emergency protection equipment three series of products.