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Ultimately, a sodium-air fuel cell could power a regional jet carrying 50 to 100 passengers on flights as long as 300 miles, according to professor Yet-Ming Chiang.

Home Science under the radar Sodium batteries could make electric flight viable Low-cost fuel cell has far higher energy density than electric car batteries and produces chemical by-product that ...

Created by Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang and colleagues at MIT, the current prototype device consists of two chambers linked by a solid ceramic electrolyte material.

Reference: “Sodium-air fuel cell for high energy density and low-cost electric power” by Karen Sugano, Sunil Mair, Saahir Ganti-Agrawal, Alden S. Friesen, Kailash Raman, William H. Woodford, Shashank ...

“We expect people to think that this is a totally crazy idea,” says co-author Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics. “If they didn’t, I’d be a bit disappointed because if people don’t ...

A new type of fuel cell that runs on sodium metal could one day help clean up sectors where it’s difficult to replace fossil fuels, like rail, regional aviation, and short-distance shipping. The ...

Journal Reference: Karen Sugano, Sunil Mair, Saahir Ganti-Agrawal, Alden S. Friesen, Kailash Raman, William H. Woodford, Shashank Sripad, Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan, Yet-Ming Chiang.

New fuel cell could enable electric aviation These devices could pack three times as much energy per pound as today’s best EV batteries, offering a lightweight option for powering trucks, planes ...

Their findings are published in the journal Joule, in a paper by MIT doctoral students Karen Sugano, Sunil Mair, and Saahir Ganti-Agrawal; professor of materials science and engineering Yet-Ming ...

Existing alternatives have their own problems, so Professor Yet-Ming Chiang of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues decided it was time for some out-of-the-box thinking.

That’s still beyond reach for any known battery chemistry, but Chiang says that getting to 1,000 watts per kilo would be an enabling technology for regional electric aviation, which accounts for ...