Battery Metals

Democratic Republic of Congo revised down its estimate of cobalt production for the first nine months of 2018, to 81,292 tonnes from an earlier estimate of 115,116 tonnes, central bank data showed on Friday.

The revision means that output of cobalt, an important component of electric car batteries, rose 35.9 percent compared to the same period in 2017, rather than 92.5 percent as the bank said previously.

The bank also revised up its estimate for copper output in the first nine months of 2018 to 911,505 tonnes from a previous estimate of 908,695 tonnes.

Congo is the world’s leading miner of cobalt and Africa’s top copper producer.

Even Tesla’s detractors concede that, when it comes to battery technology, the California carmaker has a lead of at least a couple of years over its theoretical rivals. The legacy brands are taking various approaches to try to close that gap, but Tesla is far from standing still. CNBC recently toured Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory, and talked with President of Automotive Jerome Guillen.

“The Gigafactory is critical to Tesla,” said Guillen. “There [are] more batteries produced here for electric vehicles than in the rest of the planet combined. We would not be able to make all the vehicles we are making now if we didn’t have the Gigafactory.”

Gigafactory 1 runs 24/7, and churns out about two battery packs per minute — not quite as fast as “bullets from a machine gun,” but already faster than “Grandma with a walker.” However, even as Tesla begins work on a new Gigafactory in Shanghai, and talks about building another in Europe, there’s still plenty of room to improve both the quantity and quality of the batteries produced in Nevada.

EV industry analyst Sam Jaffe, of Cairn Energy Research Advisors, estimates Tesla’s cost to manufacture a battery cell at $116 per kilowatt-hour, which he says is “far ahead of the industry.” Other carmakers’ cell-level costs are around $146 per kWh, Jaffe says. “Tesla has shown an ability and a drive to reduce both cell costs and battery pack costs. They have been planning for this moment, with this tremendous cost advantage, for a long time, and in general they have executed well on it.”

The first of Tesla’s three pillars of battery creation: building more battery cell manufacturing lines at the Gigafactory. In close cooperation with cell manufacturing partner Panasonic, Tesla is steadily building out more production capacity at the Nevada facility. This not only increases the quantity of cells produced, but also gradually brings the per-cell cost down by spreading fixed costs over a larger volume of batteries.

The second pillar: improving the design of the battery cell manufacturing lines. Everything at Tesla undergoes a continual process of analysis and incremental improvement, and the Gigafactory assembly lines are no exception. Jerome Guillen told CNBC that the company is working to improve the yield, throughput, and capacity of each production line. Again, this not only increases the quantity of cells produced, but also improves the company’s financial picture. Making more batteries from the same line translates to a better return on the capital invested in each line.

The third pillar: improving the design of the 2170 battery cell. When Tesla created its proprietary 2170 cylindrical cell, it aimed to achieve the perfect balance between energy density and the amount of surface area for cooling, which has a direct effect on battery performance and longevity. However, there is still room for improvement. “The design of the cell is not frozen,” says Guillen. “It evolves, and we have a very nice roadmap of technology improvements for the coming years.”

Guillen believes the Gigafactory is just beginning to reach its potential. “The costs have come down and continue to come down a lot, and that has enabled us to reach profitability in the last quarter and positive cash flow as well,” he said.

Dell has unveiled its new Latitude 7400 2-in-1 ahead of CES 2019, with the company claiming a battery life of 24 hours and a new proximity sensor to improve security and battery.

Announcing it will be the “first of many” Latitudes to be released in 2019, Dell Client Product Group president Jay Parker said the 7400 2-in-1 “represents the convergence of speed, security, mobility, versatility, and productivity”.

A new feature announced for the 2-in-1 is ExpressSign-in, which uses the Dell Proximity Sensor powered by Intel’s context sensing technology. It detects motion from up to 3 feet or 1 metre away, Dell Mechanical System architect Allen McKittrick told ZDNet.

“It’s a sensor that emits IR and receives IR,” McKittrick told ZDNet.

“This is a spectrum that’s invisible to the human eye, so it’s very low powered. It emits the IR, detects the user, and then it wakes the system. At that point, once that system is woken, it invokes the IR camera, the IR camera is then going to use two separate IRs that will use facial recognition through Microsoft’s Hello identification, and at that point you’re automatically logged into the system without having to touch the keyboard or lift a finger.”

With the display being the biggest drain on battery life, the proximity sensor and ExpressSign-in also detects when a user has left the room, and shuts down the screen.

“Once you walk away from the system, the proximity sensor recognises that the user is no longer in front of the system, it times out the display and locks the system, so at that point you save on battery life and you have that added layer of security where you don’t have to worry about your system being open and unlocked,” McKittrick told ZDNet.

The battery life is therefore being claimed by Dell as being the longest in the world for a product of its class.

“We are targeting 24 hours,” McKittrick said, with Parker adding that the Latitude will reach 80 percent charge in an hour thanks to express charge.

The Latitude is powered by a quad-core 8th gen WHL-U Intel processor, has up to 16GB of on-board LPDDR3 2133MHz memory, integrated Intel 620 graphics 620, and runs Windows 10.

The 2-in-1 also comes with 2x USB 3.1 gen 1 ports with PowerShare; 2x Thunderbolt 3 with power and DisplayPor; and a uSIM card slot. It has a gyroscope, eCompass/magnetometer, accelerometer, GPS, Ambient Light Sensor, and Adaptive Thermal Performance (via gyroscope/accelerometer).

Storage options include M.2 PCIe/NVMe SSD up to 1TB SSD, and Opal 2.0 SED up to 512G, with a 2TB option available in summer 2019.

The Latitude measures 320 x 8.57-15 x 200mm, with a starting weight of 3 pounds.

“We have a footprint that’s fitting a 14-inch screen into the size of a 13-inch device and doing it without sacrificing performance, without sacrificing battery life and productivity, ports, or certainly the features that IT managers require in their environment,” Parker said.

The Latitude also comes with optional mobile broadband options, including the Qualcomm Snapdragon X20 LTE-A, which works across AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint in the US for Cat 16 gigabit LTE. Wireless LAN options include dual band 802.11ac with Bluetooth 4.2 or 5.0.

“It’s about three times faster than our previous wireless WAN solution, and our antenna design allows the antenna to tune itself based on the hinge position and the mode that the 2-in-1 device is in, so that you’ll have the best throughput to keep working without slowing down even when you’re not on Wi-Fi,” Parker said.

The Latitude will launch in March, with a starting price of $1,600.

Amionx, an up-and-coming company based in California, found the key to explosion-free Li-ion batteries.

We have been waiting for a breakthrough in the field of energy storage. Many have made an attempt to create a safer and lighter version of the good old Li-ion battery, but the efforts have not yet led to a viable solution.

In the mean time, we all continue to buy electronics and gadgets. The statistics say it all. Only for the USA, the revenue in the Consumer Electronics segment amounts to US$297,778m in 2018 (up by US$34,831m since 2017). It is foreseen that the number will jump to US$331,405m in 2019, and the whooping US$362,023 in 2020.

New devices require new shapes and sizes of batteries, pushing the industry to deliver more efficient and more compact energy storage solutions. The added pressure, of course, comes with a price tag. In this case, that is safety. We keep hearing about electronics exploding or catching up on fire. Considering the potential dangers, no wonder people are cautious about this. Even on my latest flight over Christmas, the airline company warned about overheated devices, and what we should do in case we own one.

Precaution measures are important, yes, but wouldn’t it be even better if there is an energy storage mean that is safe, yet still has all the benefits- sleek, light, efficient, small, etc.?

Amionx, a company based in California, founded back in 2006 as a spin off of the American Lithium Energy, claims to have found the solution. The guys behind the “explosion-free battery” believe they will be fully licensed to offer their technology for commercial use before the end of this year. The solution that they propose is called SafeCore.

SafeCore was tested in all sorts of possible ways, including stabbing, shooting and smashing. It passed all tests with flying colors, while the regular competitors burst into flames.

The key is an additional layer of material inside the battery, which basically prevents the fire from starting. The layer acts as a shield, or rather a regulator, against high heat or high voltage. It breaks down and shuts down the battery before it can explode.

According to the scientists behind the invention, the solution would be very easy to implement in existing technology.

The technology does hold every potential, although the company is still having discussions with potential manufacturers, who would grant the licenses. It is backed up by some pretty knowledgeable experts outside the company, who are quite positive about it. Independent engineers from Georgia Tech and University of Kansas, for example, state that the approach is quite unique and very pragmatic.

So, let’s see if this would be the future of safe lithium ion batteries. Given that quite a bit of research is currently happening in the field of energy storage, I am quite curious to whether these guys would be first, or they would be beaten on the finish line by some entirely different technology, which finally replaces Li-ion all together. Exciting times.

Professor Amalia Patanè discusses some of the unprecedented opportunities offered by 2D systems, and the 2D semiconductor indium selenide (InSe) and its heterostructures.

The progressive miniaturisation of electronic devices has propelled several technologies to higher performance and efficiency, but further progress and innovative solutions to global challenges (security, health, energy, etc.) require a shift from traditional approaches towards transformative material systems and integration technologies. Atomically thin layers of van der Waals (vdW) crystals and their heterostructures,1 generally branded as two‐dimensional (2D) materials, offer a great opportunity to study and exploit quantum phenomena for a wide range of applications. These crystals have strong covalent atomic bonding in the 2D planes and weak vdW attraction between the layers, which enable the fabrication of stable films down to the atomic monolayer thickness.

The ongoing world‐wide research on 2D systems and materials has largely focussed on graphene, the wide-gap insulator hexagonal boron nitride, the narrow‐gap semiconductor black phosphorus, and transition metal dichalcogenides.2 Among these 2D systems, an exciting and rapidly growing development involves the metal chalcogenide InSe (see Fig. 1a).3-5 This 2D material has a band gap energy that increases markedly with decreasing layer thickness down to a single layer, enabling the fabrication of high-responsivity diodes with spectral response from the ultra-violet (UV) to the infrared (IR) range. It has a relatively low mass conduction band electrons and high electron mobility even in atomically thin films, larger than in silicon-based field effect transistors.

Furthermore, its band structure presents unique features: it has an almost flat, slightly inverted ‘Mexican-hat’ valence band dispersion (see Fig. 1b) with one-dimensional van Hove singularities in the density of states.6 These remarkable properties in combination with the compatibity of InSe with other 2D systems offer unprecedented opportunities to create new quantum systems, such as ‘giant’ quantum Hall plateau devices7 and single electron transistors.8

The fundamental science of 2D systems

The fundamental science of 2D systems is a rapidly developing and vibrant field and more breakthroughs are expected as new concepts emerge from experiment and theory.

Challenges include understanding how the layers interact each other and with different substrates, energy band alignments, dielectric screening, electron-phonon interactions, charge ordering due to carrier-correlation, etc. Due to the absence of dangling bonds in vdW heterostructures, it will be possible to study defect-free stacked layers without restriction on the lattice mismatch.

This will enable studies of new physical properties: the complex nature of the inverted ‘Mexican-hat’ valence band, which offers opportunities to manipulate electron interactions and correlations, and to study excitonic physics; electron-phonon interactions, carrier relaxation and exciton formation and their manipulation by strain; electrical and optical properties of moiré superlattices with a period and electronic properties that can be fine-tuned by changing the twist angle between the layers (see Fig. 1a, bottom).

These quantum phenomena can provide an exciting platform for the design of new device concepts (see Fig. 2a-c), including miniaturised phototransitors with a single or stack of 2D layers between two graphene electrodes (see Fig. 2b). Also, since InSe can sustain high mechanical strain, it could provide novel means of modulating electrical and optical signals by strain for flexible electronics and optoelectronics.

Interdisciplinary research

Beyond these opportunities, there are exciting prospects for interdisciplinary research by exploring and exploiting surface phenomena, such as oxidation and intercalation.9-11 For example, thermal- and photo-annealing in an O2 controlled environment could be explored to oxidise surfaces, thus converting a few surface layers into a transparent and conducting oxide (e.g. InSe into In2O311).

The propensity of these crystals of nanoscale thickness to oxidise in air at temperatures >100ºC or when illuminated with intense laser light is at first sight disadvantageous to future device applications; however, it could be turned to an advantage by using it to modulate and pattern the in-plane optical and electrical properties of the layers or to create topological crystals.9 The intercalation of atoms into the interlayer gaps of vdW crystals is also an interesting prospect.10

Environmentally-friendly alternative to fossil fuels

For example, hydrogen (H2) represents the most promising environmentally-friendly alternative to fossil fuels as it produces a high energy yield, is pollution free, abundant and renewable. 2D InSe is a promising catalyst for photocatalytic splitting of water into O2 and H2. Water molecules, which are absorbed on the InSe surface, should decompose when exposed to solar radiation (see Fig. 2d).

Thus, it should be possible to convert solar energy into clean and renewable H2 fuel. In order to achieve high efficiency, the photo-catalyst should have a band gap around 2.0 eV and its band edges should match the redox potentials of water, which are 4.44 eV for the reduction (H+/H2) and 5.67 eV for the oxidation (H2O/O2), respectively. These energy values could be matched by design of the InSe layer thickness. Furthermore, the major problem in using H2 as a fuel in transport is its safe storage as this normally requires materials that are subject to high pressure. InSe could accumulate H2 molecules in the vdW gaps between the atomic planes at relatively low pressure: in bulk InSe, the volume of the vdW gap comprises about 40% of the crystal, with an internal surface of this space of about 2x103m2 per 1cm3. Thus vdW crystals could be ‘fuelled-up’ with H2 by intercalation and then H2 could be extracted back, when needed, by de-intercalation (see Fig. 2e).

Scalable synthesis

While breakthroughs on these materials have been achieved using thin-films mechanically exfoliated from bulk crystals, the scalable synthesis of the layers and their controlled doping and composition are still in their infancy.12 This represents a vital step towards the reliable production of a wide range of new structures for both science and technology. Furthermore, the properties of the layers and their stability are affected by exposure to chemical species in air, such as oxygen. Thus, the use of a clean and controlled containment system for synthesising and measuring these materials is critical.

The fabrication of functional systems also requires the assembly of disparate materials with precise control of interfacial properties. This will require the development of innovative approaches for their integration into multi-layered structures for specific device architectures. Functional devices based on 2D materials have already demonstrated properties and performance parameters that can be superior or more versatile than existing technologies based on traditional semiconductors, such as silicon. However, this may not be sufficient for exploitation.

Distinct advantages and capabilities of 2D materials should be explored, including the possibility of integration with existing photonic and electronic platforms, such as CMOS technologies, with potential to enable large data communications bandwidths, high connection capacities and on-chip optical interconnects. Success in this task has the potential for implementation of 2D materials into vertically stacked integrated circuits that can deliver increased functionality and lower power consumption.

In summary, the 2D semiconductor InSe and its heterostructures offer unprecedented opportunities to create novel functional 2d systems and to open unexplored avenues in quantum science and the translation of the into technologies for digital electronics beyond Moore’s law, quantum optics for fast, secure communications, and quantum detection and imaging for sensing applications, energy, etc., offering wide benefits for society.

Aernnova (Álava, Spain), Grupo Antolin-Ingenieria (Burgos, Spain) and Airbus (Toulouse, France), working as partners in the European Union funded Graphene Flagship (Gothenburg, Sweden) consortium, have produced a leading edge for an Airbus A350 horizontal tail plane using composites enhanced with graphene.

The first part of an airplane wing or tail plane to contact air, the leading edge is subjected to extreme temperatures caused by compressive heating of the air ahead of the wing – it is crucial that the part possess good mechanical and thermal properties. According to Graphene Flagship, graphene increases the mechanical properties of the leading edge, allowing for a thinner construction, decreasing its weight, while maintaining its functions. The solution is said to result in fuel savings and emissions reductions over the lifetime of an aircraft.

“We worked together with Grupo Antolin-Ingenieria and Airbus as part of the Graphene Flagship’s Production Work Package,” says Ana Reguero from Aernnova. “Aernnova supplied the resin to Grupo Antolin-Ingenieria who added graphene directly to the resin and applied milling forces. This creates small graphene particles, an important step to get good graphene infiltration within the resin, avoiding unwanted impurities, such as solvents, which can alter the viscosity of the resin. It is important to maintain the correct viscosity of the resin to ensure the optimal outcome during the resin transfer moulding of the leading edge.”

At a component level the team found that the resin showed increased mechanical and thermal properties upon graphene addition, including a decreased fracture speed.