Credit: Image courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
A highly reversible aqueous zinc-manganese oxide battery offers a cost effective, environmental friendly alternative energy storage to help stabilize the electrical grid. In depth analysis of the structure and chemistry in zinc-manganese oxide batteries provided insights on the mechanisms that controlled the battery chemistry and allowed development of a system with longer battery lifetime. Shown is a high resolution image of the atomic structure of the manganese oxide battery electrode material when fully discharged (left) and charged (right). The discharged image shows that the initial pristine, well-defined nanofibers were transformed to short nanorods and nanoparticle aggregates. When recharged, the structure reverts to the crystalline manganese oxide structure. (The spacing between the fringes in the images is about 0.3 nanometers – less than the width of a single strand of DNA, or the size of a few atoms side by side)