Lithium News

Energy management company Lithium Werks, known for its Nanophosphate Cells and its smart lithium-ion modules, is merging with fellow lithium battery developer and producer Super B. The company is also building a clean energy R&D center at Twente Airport.

Earlier this month, with the merger of Lithium Werks and Super B, a new global company – Lithium Werks BV – serving over 1,000 customers in nearly 50 countries was formed. With more than 400 patents for lithium technology, the company is a leading player when it comes to technical know-how.

Earlier this year, Lithium Werks acquired the assets of the former Valence Technology, Inc, and the Industrial business of A123 Systems, LLC. So basically, the new Dutch company Lithium Werks B.V. is a joint force between a leading cell supplier, offering high-quality Nanophosphate™ Cells, and two A-brand battery system suppliers: Valence and Super B.

“Our strategic partnership has evolved. We now know that the best way for us to meet our customers’ growing demand for portable power solutions is to join forces,” said T. Joseph Fisher III, CEO, and co-founder of Lithium Werks.

Super B’s chief executive Henk Kleef said: “The strong brand positions of both Valence and Super B for battery systems enables the development and expansion of the new Lithium Werks organization.

A new Research and Development Campus

And just 10 days after announcing the merger and formation of the new company, Lithium Werks BV revealed the company was building a major clean energy research and development (R&D) campus at Twente Airport, according to Aviation Pros.

“In order to achieve a real transition, from fossil fuels to renewables, energy has to be available in the right place and at the right time,” said the initiator Kees Koolen, chairman of the board, Lithium Werks. “Over the next five years, we will recruit some 2,000 people to develop clean energy technologies at the campus.”

Koolen points out that automakers such as Tesla, Nissan, and BMW have been the focus of investors as consumers look to clean energy technologies, but industries from ships and trains to mining and construction are also poised to shift away from fossil fuels. These are the companies Lithium Werks BV intends to serve.

“We want to work on the electrification of everything that isn’t cars and consumer electronics,” he says. “Those markets are already saturated, and we see a big opportunity beyond them.” However, Lithium Werks BV is also looking into the future to find ways of plugging gaps in output from wind and solar plants—a job currently done by conventional power plants.

“Renewable energy sources, such as wind and sun, often produce the most energy at times when the demand is low. This mismatch between supply and demand means it is still necessary to have conventional coal or gas power stations. With smart energy storage and transport solutions, the energy will be available at the right time and place. This will require both sufficient battery capacity – we need to produce many more batteries – and artificial intelligence software,” said Koolen.

R&D Campus as Technology Base

Over EUR $100 million has been invested in the creation of the 42 acre R&D campus for the development of a mobile battery ecosystem at Technology Base. The campus will be built in phases.

The first phase is expected to be completed by the end of 2019, initially providing work for approximately 300 people to research new technologies in the field of clean energy. Lithium Werks BV anticipates recruiting some 2,000 people within five years to carry out R&D at the campus.

Lithium Werks is a fast-growing global lithium-ion battery company with production facilities in China and offices in the USA, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Great Britain, and Norway. Lithium Werks provides cells, modules, and battery management systems into markets such as material handling, stationary energy storage, medical, and commercial marine.

UPS and the marine sector have experienced the innovative and reliable Super B lithium battery solutions. The Super B solutions are developed and produced in Hengelo, The Netherlands and supported with worldwide regional sales/service centers.

 

Engineers at the University of Maryland have created a thin battery, made of a few million carefully constructed “microbatteries” in a square inch. Each microbattery is shaped like a very tall, round room, providing much surface area – like wall space – on which nano-thin battery layers are assembled. The thin layers together with large surface area produces very high power along with high energy. It is dubbed a “3-D battery” because each microbattery has a distinctly 3-D shape.

These 3-D batteries push conventional planar thin-film solid state batteries into a third dimension. Planar batteries are a single stack of flat layers serving the roles of anode, electrolyte, cathode and current collectors.

But to make the 3-D batteries, the researchers drilled narrow holes are formed in silicon, no wider than a strand of spider silk but many times deeper. The battery materials were coated on the interior walls of the deep holes. The increased wall surface of the 3-D microbatteries provides increased energy, while the thinness of the layers dramatically increases the power that can be delivered. The process is a little more complicated and expensive than its flat counterpart, but leads to more energy and higher power in the same footprint.

For well over a decade, battery researchers have known the power and energy benefits such a 3-D battery design, but fabrication and testing have been unsuccessful until the recent success by the Maryland NEES team. That’s because they thought to use a technique called atomic-layer deposition, in which each layer is only a few atoms thick. Each material, for each part of the battery, is heated until the atoms create a fine mist which settles down over the shape, attaching itself closely and in a fine thin layer. Building the batteries this way ensured that each layer conformed to the sides of the hole, with no blobs or uncoated spaces.

This paper shows a “definitive proof of concept that energy density and power density increase in accordance with increased surface area,” said Keith Gregorczyk, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland, and a member of the team that achieved the 3-D microbatteries.

“A huge advantage of this battery is that it is solid-state, meaning it contains no flammable liquids to catch fire like conventional lithium-based batteries can,” said Gary Rubloff, the principal investigator of the study. “And because it is fabricated using the same manufacturing processes as those for semiconductor chips, it can be incorporated directly into a variety of devices, from health monitors and cellphones to many other applications.”

Rubloff is Director of Nanostructures for Electrical Energy Storage (NEES), a $25.2M DOE-sponsored Energy Frontier Research Center grant. Rubloff is also the founding director of the Maryland NanoCenter and a Distinguished University Professor with appointments in the department of materials science and engineering, the Institute for Systems Research, and the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics.

A description and analysis of the 3-D solid state battery and its potential appeared in the journal ACS Nano on April 24, 2018.

Bombardier Transportation has introduced a new battery-operated train: the BOMBARDIER TALENT 3 train. The new battery-operated train is the first of its kind to enter passenger operation in Europe in more than 60 years.

It does not generate any exhaust and sets the standards for smart mobility with peak values of 90 percent in the areas of efficiency and recyclability. It is also around 50% quieter than modern diesel trains. According to a comparative study by the Technical University of Dresden, the battery-operated train clearly has an edge with respect to the total costs across the service life of 30 years.

The range of the train will increase proportionally with the continuous capacity increases due to new battery developments. The current prototype is equipped with four BOMBARDIER MITRAC traction batteries (earlier post) and can travel routes of around 40 kilometers. In 2019, the next generation of battery-operated trains will be able to cover distances of up to 100 kilometers on non-electrified railways.

In 2019, Deutsche Bahn (DB) will start a twelve-month trial run with passengers with the current prototype in the Alb-Lake Constance region.

The German government subsidized the development of the battery-operated train with €4 million in the framework of an innovation program for electromobility. The project partners include the DB Regio subsidiary DB ZugBusRegionalverkehr Alb-Bodensee (regional transport for the Lake Constance region), Nahverkehrsgesellschaft Baden-Württemberg (Baden-Wuerttemberg Regional Transport Company) and the Nationale Organisation Wasserstoff- und Brennstoffzellentechnologie (National Organization for Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology) and the Technical University of Berlin.

Salt precipitation method dispenses with the need for a mechanical pump, leading to smaller, cheaper aqueous ionic batteries

A new flexible aqueous ionic battery is the first of its kind to operate without an electrolyte-driving pump. This makes the battery much smaller than its predecessors – about the size of a USB drive – and simple and cheap to manufacture with no metal components.

Conceptually similar to an electrical circuit, in an ionic circuit ions carry the charge instead of electrons. But metal cannot conduct ions, and instead of a wire the ions travel through an aqueous electrolyte. The best example of this is you – the human nervous system is a vastly complex ionic circuit, where sodium and potassium ion gradients carry information through each nerve cell.

Indeed, ionic circuitry has the potential to interface more directly with biological systems than traditional electronics, and the absence of toxic metal components makes them an attractive prospect for implantable applications.

Fully ionic power sources for such ionic circuitry typically operate by reverse electrodialysis, where salinity differentials across ion selective membranes generate charge. A salt solution sandwiched between an anion selective membrane and a cation selective membrane, each with pure water on the other side, will lead to positive and negative ions diffusing in opposite directions and creating a potential difference. Typically, a mechanical pump is required to circulate the electrolyte and maintain the salinity gradient so that the battery can continue producing power.

Taek Dong Chung and his colleagues at Seoul National University have designed a new type of battery that operates on a phenomenon they call precipitation-assisted reverse elecytodialysis. Their battery consists of a stack of alternating chambers of fresh water and dissolved salt, separated by cation and anion selective membranes. The trick is that every first salt chamber contains BaCl2 and every second salt chamber contains Ag2SO4, both of which are soluble. All of the anions move one way and all of the cations move the other, leading to the formation of insoluble BaSO4 and AgCl salts in each of the fresh water chambers, which spontaneously precipitate out of the electrolyte, removing themselves from the equation.

‘It is a fascinating alternative as a new power source for active biosensors,’ says Chung. ‘These cells can be fabricated with all organic materials at very low cost, and they avoid the huge amounts of toxic metal waste from traditional batteries.’ Another advantage is that the batteries are assembled dry and activated by adding water. As they are electrochemically inert until water is added, they could be stored for long periods.

‘It could also be used to power sensors embedded in cell cultures,’ comments Hsueh-Chia Chang, an expert in biosensing at University of Notre Dame, US. ‘Since the desired current is ionic anyway, there is no need to involve metallic electron-transfer reactions, which are harmful to living cells. I see many medical and biological applications in the future, once the lifetime of the reverse electrodialysis battery is increased to practical values.’

For Tesla owners who don’t have free Supercharging and battery packs with software-limited battery capacity, Tesla is temporarily enabling both for those in Hurricane Florence’s path in order to facilitate their travels.

That’s due to Tesla using an unforeseen feature of their over-the-air software update system.

Tesla used to offer the option to buy a Model S or Model X with a 75 kWh battery pack software-locked at a capacity of 60 kWh. The option would result in a less expensive vehicle with a shorter range and the option to pay to remotely enable the longer range at a later stage.

Some of those owners on the Carolina coast are reporting this morning receiving this notification from Tesla inside their cars:

“We are temporarily enabling your car to access additional battery capacity, as well as free Supercharging, in preparation for Hurrican Florence. We hope this gives you the peace of mind to get to a safe location, and will notify you before returning your car to its original configuration in mid-October. Badging on your display may adjust during this period. Safe travels.”

Hurricane Florence, a potentially dangerous category 4 storm, is currently heading toward the Carolina coast and it is expected to hit North Carolina fairly hard.

Tesla did the same thing in Florida last year when Hurricane Irma hit the region.

It results in unlocking 15 kWh of battery capacity for approximately 30 to 40 additional miles.

Furthermore, Tesla’s Superchargers have often proven to be a more useful way to recharge than gas stations for gasoline cars in those scenarios as long lines are formed as people rush to get out of evacuation zones and other areas at risk.

During Irma last year, many gas stations ended up running out of gas.

Masdar, the Abu Dhabi future energy company, will help the Public Utilities Corporation (PUC) in building a five-megawatt (MW) solar photovoltaic (PV) power plant with battery storage in the Republic of Seychelles.

The project is being financed by a $8.4mn loan from Abu Dhabi Fund for Development (ADFD), the leading national entity for development aid, as well as funds from PUC’s own equity.

The project’s engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract scope includes subsea cabling, switchgear extensions, and an underground water piping system for module cleaning.

The 5MW Ile de Romainville Solar Park will be located on the same site as the existing ADFD-financed AED103 million Port Victoria Wind Farm. Built by Masdar, this 6MW renewable energy wind farm has been generating power for the Seychelles’ capital since 2013.

The new project will also include an energy storage system (ESS) with a capacity of 5MW and 3.3 megawatt-hours (MWh), allowing for the safe and stable supply of electricity to the main island of Mahé, while also ensuring the grid stability and safe operation of PUC’s conventional fuel-fired power station.

Due for completion in Q2 2019, the 5MW Ile de Romainville Solar Park is part of ADFD and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) Project Facility. ADFD has committed US$350 million in concessionary loans over seven funding cycles to support the establishment of renewable energy projects in developing countries.

“Seychelles has placed climate change at the centre of its sustainable development strategy,” said Mohammed Saif Al Suwaidi, Director General of ADFD.

“Contributing to the financing of this solar park with integrated battery storage will bolster ADFD’s efforts in supporting the island country’s priorities, especially with regard to mitigating carbon emissions through the deployment of renewable energy.

“Cutting-edge projects like the Ile de Romainville Solar Park demonstrate the benefits of renewable energy ventures in long-term socio-economic development.”

Mohamed Jameel Al Ramahi, Chief Executive Officer of Masdar, said: “This collaboration will be an opportunity to harness the latest efficiency enhancements in solar power technology, including the optimisation benefits of battery storage.”

Seychelles currently relies on fossil fuels to meet its electricity demand, with fossil fuels accounting for around 20% of the country’s imports. In response, it has set a target of 5 per cent renewables by 2020 and 15% by 2030. It is estimated that the Ile de Romainville solar project will save approximately 2,000,000 litres of fuel annually.

Philippe Morin, CEO of PUC, said: “By combining solar energy with wind power, Seychelles will double its renewables capacity while freeing up resources for economic development. The battery storage component will also address the intermittency challenges of renewables, further consolidating Seychelles’ energy security.”

The new solar PV project will be installed on the same artificial island hosting five of the eight wind turbines of the Port Victoria Wind Farm. The PV array has been specifically designed to maximise the use of available land, while allowing for the maintenance of the wind turbines and minimising any shading losses resulting from them.

Operational since 2013, the eight wind turbines of the Port Victoria Wind Farm supply approximately 2,100 households on Mahé, Seychelles’ largest island, home to its capital city Victoria.