Illinois Tech spinoff Influit Energy says it's coming out of stealth mode to commercialize a rechargeable electrofuel – a non-flammable, fast-refuelling liquid flow battery that already carries 23% more energy than lithium batteries, at half the cost.

Very much targeted at vehicles and aircraft, Influit's "nanoelectrofuels" offer an alternative to current battery tech with what appears to be a pretty compelling list of pros and cons.

The company pitches its tech as a new type of flow battery – we've written plenty about these in the past; typically they involve two chemical liquids that are pumped over opposing sides of an ion exchange membrane to create a flow of electric current. Energy density tends to be low, because only so much battery material can be dissolved in a liquid before it starts to settle at the bottom of the tank, making it useless. This low density tends to relegate flow batteries to big, slow, cheap grid-level storage system projects and the like.

Influit says it solves this issue by using infinteissimally tiny solid nanoparticles of active metal oxide battery material suspended, rather than dissolved, in its base fluid, such that random Brownian motion alone is enough to keep the particles from settling to the bottom. It claims its nanoparticles are surface-modified to prevent agglomeration and reduce the viscosity of the solution, to the point where its electrofuels flow more or less like motor oil.

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