Magnesium offers many useful properties for electrochemical energy storage: it is highly available on earth and non-toxic, it transports two charges per Mg-ion instead of just one (like lithium), and it allows sufficiently high cell voltages. Another great advantage is that the deposition of magnesium at the negative electrode of a battery does not lead to dendrite formation and thus short circuits as with lithium, so that the undiluted magnesium metal can be used as a safe anode with a very high capacity. This means that the Mg battery has great potential to develop into a safe, sustainable and high-performance battery technology.
Important obstacles on the way to a competitive magnesium battery are the low ionic mobility of the ion in solids and liquids, the insufficient capacity of the positive electrode and the kinetic barriers associated with ionic transport and insertion, which lead to a loss of battery efficiency. Within the cluster, we are trying to better understand these barriers and, based on this understanding, to eliminate them in order to develop a prototype of a magnesium battery within the next few years.
