Battery Metals

It’s in cell phones and even some sporting goods — and soon, for the first time in automotive, it will be under the hood in Ford vehicles.

Ford Motor Company is announcing the use of graphene — a two-dimensional nanomaterial — in vehicle parts, timely with National Nanotechnology Day.

Graphene has recently generated the enthusiasm and excitement in the automotive industry for paint, polymer, and battery applications.

Dubbed a “miracle material” by some engineers, graphene is 200 times stronger than steel and one of the most conductive materials in the world. It is a great sound barrier and is extremely thin and flexible.

Graphene is not economically viable for all applications, but Ford, in collaboration with Eagle Industries and XG Sciences, has found a way to use small amounts in fuel rail covers, pump covers, and front engine covers to maximize its benefits.

“The breakthrough here is not in the material, but in how we are using it,” says Debbie Mielewski, Ford senior technical leader, sustainability and emerging materials.

“We are able to use a very small amount, less than a half percent, to help us achieve significant enhancements in durability, sound resistance and weight reduction — applications that others have not focused on.”

Graphene was first isolated in 2004, but application breakthroughs are relatively new. The first experiment to isolate graphene was done by using pencil lead, which contains graphite, and a piece of tape, using the tape to pull off layers of graphite to create a material that is a single layer thick — graphene. This experiment won a Nobel Prize in 2010.

In 2014, Ford began working with suppliers to study the material and how to use it in running trials with auto parts such as fuel rail covers, pump covers, and front engine covers.

Generally, attempting to reduce noise inside vehicle cabins means adding more material and weight, but with graphene, it’s the opposite.

“A small amount of graphene goes a long way, and in this case, it has a significant effect on sound absorption qualities,” says John Bull, president of Eagle Industries.

The graphene is mixed with foam constituents, and tests done by Ford and suppliers has shown about a 17 percent reduction in noise, a 20 percent improvement in mechanical properties and a 30 percent improvement in heat endurance properties, compared with that of the foam used without graphene.

“We are excited about the performance benefits our products are able to provide to Ford and Eagle Industries,” says Philip Rose, XG Sciences’ chief executive officer.

“Working with early adopters such as Ford Motor Company demonstrates the potential for graphene in multiple applications, and we look forward to extending our collaboration into other materials, and enabling further performance improvements.”

Graphene is expected to go into production by year-end on over 10 under hood components on the Ford F-150 and Mustang — and, eventually, other Ford vehicles.

Where researchers who worked with two-dimensional materials and those who worked with membranes were once separate, synergistic opportunities are resulting in exciting new developments at their intersection, a Vanderbilt University chemical and biomolecular engineering professor has both opined and proven.

In a review published earlier this year in Advanced Materials, Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Piran Kidambi and his team explored new interest in using materials only one atom thick for membrane applications.

They explained the landscape on how the technology evolved and advanced and how the field is ripe for collaborations.

Kidambi and his team more recently applied that overlap in their own work to address some of the most critical challenges in membrane research: achieving high flow-through membranes without compromising filtration performance.

The team initially focused on developing methods to directly form nanoscale holes into an atomically thin material.

The team dialed down the temperature during graphene and found this resulted in nanoscale holes — missing carbon atoms from the two-dimensional layer of them bonded in a hexagonal lattice.

“It reminded me of decreasing the temperature while baking a chocolate cake to get a different texture,” Kidambi says.

However, the atomically thin graphene with nanoscales holes needed to be supported to form a membrane.

The team turned to conventional polymer membrane manufacturing techniques and decided to spread a thin polymer layer on the nanoporous graphene and dipped the stack into a water bath.

The dip transformed the polymer to a porous support layer with graphene on the top, effectively forming an atomically thin membrane.

“Continuing on with the baking analogy, this was like dough transforming into porous bread — the support polymer layer.”

The team used these atomically thin membranes to demonstrate separation of salt and small molecules from small proteins.

“Most commercial membranes achieve separation at small size ranges by making a dense polymer layer that is several microns thick with tortuous pores,” Kidambi says.

“Diffusion across these layers is very slow. Here, we make membranes that are one atom thick and show much higher permeance — up to 100 times greater than the state-of-the-art commercial dialysis membranes — specifically in the low molecular weight cut-off range.

“We think these membranes could offer transformative advances for small molecule separation, fine chemical purification, buffer exchange and a number of other processes including lab-scale dialysis.”

Kidambi’s paper on his work, “Facile Fabrication of Large-Area Atomically Thin Membranes by Direct Synthesis of Graphene with Nanoscale Porosity,” appears online in Advanced Materials.

The team included collaborators from MIT, Oxford University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory and was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy at MIT and faculty startup funding at Vanderbilt.

Kidambi says his next step is collaborating with the Vanderbilt University Medical Center to explore therapeutic applications.

Carlow is an unlikely staging post in the super-charged rise of a key player in China’s push to dominate the global electric-vehicle revolution.

Ganfeng Lithium sent a team to the town in 2013, shuttling between prospective lithium deposits dotted around the countryside. It was part of their company’s first foray outside China amid a drive to boost production of key materials needed to make rechargeable batteries.

With projects and partnerships now spanning South America to Australia, Ganfeng is aiming to use proceeds from a share sale in Hong Kong this week to continue a growth spree that’s forecast to make it the industry’s second-largest producer from this year.

“They understood so many years back – in the early 2000s – that lithium would be driving all of the green energy revolution,” said Kirill Klip, a former executive with Ganfeng’s first overseas partner, International Lithium, who joined the working party in Ireland.

“It’s a very hands-on approach, literally – they were working with our geologists turning over rocks, studying all the lithium boulders,” said Klip, now executive chairman of TNR Gold.

Since the Irish expedition, Ganfeng’s share of refined lithium output has jumped from about 6 per cent in 2013 to an estimated 11 per cent this year, according to Roskill Information Services. It accounts for about a quarter of battery-grade lithium hydroxide, the material that’s now most sought after by carmakers, the researcher’s data shows.

Formed in 2000 in southeastern Jiangxi province and listed in Shenzhen a decade later, Ganfeng’s expertise has been in processing lithium raw materials – which come typically from South America’s salt lakes or mines in Australia – into the next stage chemical products that can be used in lithium-ion batteries.

Its rapid growth and plans to use its share sale proceeds to lift output further have drawn blue-chip customers anxious to secure long-term supply. Since August, Ganfeng has struck new agreements with Tesla, BMW, and battery producer LG Chem.

“They’ve reacted quickly in a changing market and that’s enabled them to grow their output to market requirements,” said Robert Baylis, a London-based analyst with Roskill. “Other companies haven’t been able to do that with the same speed.”

That swift growth has been well timed. Fewer than one million EVs had been sold in total at the start of 2016, there are now about four million on the world’s roads and it’ll take only about another six months to add a further million, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The jump in lithium output has swelled Ganfeng’s earnings – forecast to rise about a third this year – and catapulted the company ahead of established industry leaders such as FMC in terms of volumes. It’s on course to surpass the second-largest, Chile’s Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile, this year, according to consultant CRU, and is seen eventually challenging the number one, Albemarle.

Changing the industry

“It’s changed the face of the industry – you had the big three and now you’ve gone to the big five,” said Mike Tamlin, chief operating officer of Neometals , a partner with Gangfeng and Mineral Resources, in the Mt Marion mine in Western Australia. “Arguably the pecking order in the big five has changed” with the expansion of Ganfeng and Tianqi Lithium, he said.

Ganfeng added a stake in Mt Marion in 2015 and made its first overseas investment in 2011 with Canada’s International Lithium, which remains a partner on prospective development projects in Argentina and the Avalonia venture in Ireland. With Lithium Americas, Ganfeng is aiming to begin production in 2020 at the Cauchari-Olaroz project in Argentina’s northwestern Jujuy province, according to filings.

Still, the company remains disciplined on its growth plans, vice chairman Wang Xiaoshen said this week during an interview in Shanghai.

“We lithium suppliers still have to be careful not to over-expand our business, we have to be more conservative,” said Wang. “We want to do things step-by-step, every year see how the market grows, see how the near-term demand grows,” he said.

Recent expansions were announced only once the company had secured long-term supply agreements with customers such as LG Chem and BMW, according to Wang. “So we don’t just dream about big demand coming and then build capacity,” he said, adding that Ganfeng can expand relatively quickly when needed.

While this week’s share sale has attracted cornerstone investors including battery producers LG Chem and Samsung SDI, the listing was priced at the bottom of the expected range, according a statement published Wednesday in the South China Morning Post.

Ganfeng’s shares in Shenzhen dropped as much as 10 per cent and competitor Tianqi fell as much as 9 per cent. In Australia, Orocobre . slipped as much as 6.4 per cent and Neometals declined 2 per cent.

Undervalued

The listing price was “significantly undervalued” as investors were put off by factors such as depressed spot lithium prices, according to Ganfeng’s Wang, who said the company’s priority was to get financing for its near-term projects and that it now wants to move on.

For the longer term, Ganfeng is positioning itself for opportunities beyond raw materials, including battery production and recycling.

The producer “has always had a very forward-looking approach,” said Andrew Miller, a London-based analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, an industry consultant. Expansions into recycling and cell production “will be crucial for the company to sustain its growth into the next chapter of battery market developments,” he said. – Bloomberg

Batteries are like mousetraps: If you can build a better one, the world will beat a path to your door. In 2013, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) created the RANGE Program, short for “Robust Affordable Next Generation Energy Storage Systems.” The Department of Energy (DoE) had recognized that electrochemical energy storage (batteries) were going to play a vital role in future renewable power grids and electric vehicles. ARPA-E wanted to find a way to dramatically improve safety, energy density (translating to greater vehicle range), and cost.

One of the companies that accepted the RANGE challenge was a then-new startup called Cadenza Innovation. The small US firm was made up of world-recognized battery experts and led by Dr. Christina Lampe-Onnerud. With a Ph.D. from Uppsala, Sweden in inorganic chemistry, a post-doc assignment at MIT, and recent experience as the head of battery-maker Boston Power, Dr. Lampe-Onnerud saw that RANGE provided her startup with an opportunity to define some of the basic requirements that future lithium ion battery systems would be expected to meet.

A Chance to Define the Future

“I felt committed to the space and saw this opportunity to bring forward a platform that could lead with cost and safety, but that had to have the core property of high performance,” Dr. Lampe-Onnerud explained to Design News. “I took the opportunity to define high-performance as high volumetric energy density—meaning more energy in a given space than what you commonly see. I also had the chance to help define the concept the industry now considers safety. We could set a standard globally where a product can fail but never harm. In the battery world, that means you can have a battery stop working, but it can’t kill you, or explode, or start a fire in normal operating circumstances,” Lampe-Onnerud told us.

A large amount of lithium ion battery research takes place on the electrochemistry level—creating and testing new electrode and electrolyte materials, often in tiny coin-sized cells. The problem is that the sometimes promising results from laboratory testing don’t always work when scaled up to usable battery configurations. “Everyone gets so excited for the tiniest electron shift, forgetting that it takes a lot of work to get from that into real product,” said Lampe-Onnerud. “And then, when you have real product, it’s still not a done deal. You have to qualify into the existing platforms.” Instead of working on basic battery cell chemistry, Cadenza set out to find ways to improve the packaging of the entire battery system.

Improving the System

The Cadenza team noted that a small system defect of fault could initiate a large and potentially dangerous release of energy. When thermal runaway occurred in one cell, it could quickly spread to others, resulting in a fire that involved the entire pack. The Cadenza solution is called a “supercell.” It consists of a structure that holds the battery cells in place, which also separates them using a thermally insulating and fireproof material. The battery cells can be prismatic, pouch, or the cylindrical “jelly-rolls” that Lampe-Onnerud prefers for high energy density and ease in manufacturing.

“Basically, (we use) very high temperature ceramic fibers, and they are mixed in with insulation materials and with fire retardants. The process is a little bit like the one used to make egg cartons, but with ceramic instead of cellulose fibers,” Lampe-Onnerud said. “They are pre-shaped and shipped to the factory, and you ship in the jelly rolls and the metal pieces and then you assemble, activate the cells, and off they go!”

The ceramic fibers act as a fireproof thermal insulator between the cells, so if one cell experiences thermal runaway, it is less likely to spread to adjacent cells. The material bonding the supercell fibers together is also mixed with a fire-retarding material that is released if the structure reaches a critical temperature. Packaging smaller battery cells into standardized blocks allows the electrical connections to each cell to be simpler and more robust and reliable. Temperature activated electrical cutoffs can also be used to isolate the supercell blocks from one another in the event of thermal incidents.

The adaptability of the supercell is an important feature. “The architecture itself is chemistry agnostic. So that means you can commit robotics to the assembly of the cells without fearing that there will be a better cathode in years down the road. In fact, you just place it into the platform when it is commercially viable, price-wise,” said Lampe-Onnerud.

“This platform is incredibly simple to assemble and make this invention into the real thing. You can basically source less than 50 components globally and assemble it locally. So when the world goes into nationalism and protectionism, we have a platform that allows for domestic manufacturing,” said Lampe-Onnerud.

Containing Costs

Costs are also contained using Cadenza’s concept. “Because it’s so simple to make, you are cost effective at very low volumes compared to traditional industries, where you had to have these gigantic factories. We get a lot of credit for the technical innovation, but this is actually—in my mind—maybe the bigger deal. The fact that we have disrupted the way batteries have always been thought of; You can now be a battery producer without having all of the expertise. We have created an ecosystem around this. So, I am very hopeful that we will have a chance to have an impact,” she told us.

“It is, of course a crazy time for this battery industry because you can hear of new inventions almost weekly, but you know that almost every invention that comes to light takes 20 years to commercialize. It’s not like every technology that’s announced is successful. It has to satisfy, of course, all of the elements of commercialization, which includes price, reliability of supply, and supply chain going into that product. But it also has to satisfy the ease of processing, which is non-trivial. I celebrate innovation and part of my goal is to make it easier to distinguish from real innovation to what could be an interesting technology,” said Lampe-Onnerud.

Recently, Shenzhen BAK Power Battery Co., Ltd. of China signed an agreement with Cadenza Innovation to begin producing lithium ion cells and modules using the Cadenza supercell configuration. The emphasis will be on battery systems for electric vehicles when production begins in 2019.

It’s a Big Deal

Dr. Lampe-Onnerud put the importance of the agreement in perspective. “In some ways, it’s a big deal because it potentially allows the lithium ion technology invention that was uncovered in the 1970s to finally deliver on that promise of high energy density, safety, and low cost,” she said. “And cost is of course critical at this point, where you have global energy markets in transformation. Energy storage is going to be critical—both to increase operational efficiencies and thus make more money in energy, and yet wean us off the dependence on fossil fuels. At the same time, we have another megatrend around the decentralization of electricity in general,” she explained.

“With the emerging technology breakthroughs that are now being commoditized, and deployed, with electric transport—and with an attention to detail on how electricity is distributed—we hit two-thirds potentially of climate change hazardous emissions,” she said. Dr. Lampe-Onnerud is optimistic. “I am fairly convinced that if we execute well, if we stay on course, and we work very closely with our ecosystem, we could have an opportunity to transform at least a little piece of this very complicated climate puzzle that we are basically facing.”

There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people. Nearly all of them are powered by rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, the single most important component enabling the portable electronics revolution of the past few decades. None of those devices would be attractive to users if they didn’t have enough power to last at least several hours, without being particularly heavy.

Lithium-ion batteries are also useful in larger applications, such as electric vehicles and smart-grid energy storage systems. And researchers’ innovations in materials science, seeking to improve lithium-ion batteries, are paving the way for even more batteries with even better performance. There is already demand forming for high-capacity batteries that won’t catch fire or explode. And many people have dreamed of smaller, lighter batteries that charge in minutes — or even seconds — yet store enough energy to power a device for days.

Researchers like me, though, are thinking even more adventurously. Cars and grid-storage systems would be even better if they could be discharged and recharged tens of thousands of times over many years, or even decades. Maintenance crews and customers would love batteries that could monitor themselves and send alerts if they were damaged or no longer functioning at peak performance – or even were able to fix themselves. And it can’t be too much to dream of dual-purpose batteries integrated into the structure of an item, helping to shape the form of a smartphone, car or building while also powering its functions.

All that may become possible as my research and others’ help scientists and engineers become ever more adept at controlling and handling matter at the scale of individual atoms.

Emerging materials

For the most part, advances in energy storage will rely on the continuing development of materials science, pushing the limits of performance of existing battery materials and developing entirely new battery structures and compositions.

The battery industry is already working to reduce the cost of lithium-ion batteries, including by removing expensive cobalt from their positive electrodes, called cathodes. This also would reduce the human cost of these batteries, because many mines in Congo, the world’s leading source of cobalt, use children to do difficult manual labor.

The battery industry is already working to reduce the cost of lithium-ion batteries, including by removing expensive cobalt from their positive electrodes, called cathodes.

Researchers are finding ways to replace the cobalt-containing materials with cathodes made mostly of nickel. Eventually, they may be able to replace the nickel with manganese. Each of those metals is cheaper, more abundant and safer to work with than its predecessor. But they come with a trade-off, because they have chemical properties that shorten their batteries’ lifetimes.

Researchers are also looking at replacing the lithium ions that shuttle between the two electrodes with ions and electrolytes that may be cheaper and potentially safer, such as those based on sodium, magnesium, zinc or aluminum.

My research group looks at the possibilities of using two-dimensional materials, essentially extremely thin sheets of substances with useful electronic properties. Graphene is perhaps the best-known of these — a sheet of carbon just one atom thick. We want to see whether stacking up layers of various two-dimensional materials and then infiltrating the stack with water or other conductive liquids could be key components of batteries that recharge very quickly.

Looking inside the battery

It’s not just new materials expanding the world of battery innovation: New equipment and methods also let researchers see what’s happening inside batteries much more easily than was once possible.

In the past, researchers ran a battery through a particular charge-discharge process for a number of cycles and then removed the material from the battery and examined it after the fact. Only then could scholars learn what chemical changes had happened during the process and infer how the battery actually worked and what affected its performance.

But now, researchers can watch battery materials as they undergo the energy storage process, analyzing even their atomic structure and composition in real time. We can use sophisticated spectroscopy techniques, such as X-ray techniques available with a type of particle accelerator called a synchrotron — as well as electron microscopes and scanning probes — to watch ions move and physical structures change as energy is stored in and released from materials in a battery.

Those methods let researchers like me imagine new battery structures and materials, make them and see how well — or not — they work. That way, we’ll be able to keep the battery materials revolution going.

Some Tesla Model S and Model X customers in the path of Hurricane Michael will get a little extra boost in the coming days thanks to a remote software update from Tesla headquarters that temporarily increases the battery capacity of its cars.

This is at least the third time Tesla has done this. Tesla did the same thing for customers affected by Hurricane Florence last month and for Hurricane Irma last year. The upgrades provide Tesla customers with up to 40 miles of additional range.

The update is possible because Tesla sold some Model X and Model S cars with more battery capacity in hardware than the customer actually paid for. Tesla sometimes shipped 75kWh batteries to customers who had only paid for 60kWh or 70kWh worth of battery capacity. In other cases, Tesla shipped 60kWh batteries to people who had ordered 40kWh batteries.

Tesla locked the extra capacity in software and offered customers the option to unlock it as an aftermarket upgrade.

Tesla originally shipped these battery-locked cars because it simplified manufacturing to make fewer types of battery packs. Also, doing things this way created an up-selling opportunity—Tesla initially charged $9,000 to upgrade from 60 to 75kWh, though the upgrade price has come down more recently.

Tesla says that some customers in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina will get the free, temporary battery upgrade. In addition, all customers in hurricane-affected areas will receive free use of superchargers.

Tesla is more aggressive than any other car company about pushing out remote software updates that change a vehicle’s behavior. In May, Tesla pushed out an update to improve the performance of the brakes on the Model 3 after Consumer Reports faulted the car for its inconsistent braking performance. Other car companies are working on similar capabilities, but the laws in some states require software upgrades to be done at dealerships—a requirement Tesla skirts by not having any dealerships.