Lithium News

Across all six of the Army’s modernization priorities — long-range precision fires, next generation combat vehicle, future vertical lift, network, air and missile defense, and Soldier lethality — there has been a dramatic increase in demand for power as a result of the introduction of new system capabilities and prototypes that are energy hungry, said an Army lead engineer.

Of particular concern for Soldiers is the increase in energy demand in the areas of Soldier lethality, including augmented reality, said Julianne Douglas, Energy Harvesting Technology lead with the Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center.

Douglas spoke at a National Defense Industrial Association-sponsored Army Science & Technology Symposium and Showcase, Aug. 22.

Increased energy demands will soon result in an increase in the quantity of batteries Soldiers must carry on dismounted patrols, Douglas said.

Based on her discussions with the Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team, which is in charge of overseeing the progress for that particular modernization priority, Douglas said a rifleman today requires an average of 12 watts of power in the form of AA and conformal wearable batteries. That means the weight requirement of batteries for a standard 72-hour patrol is about 15 pounds.

That includes batteries for such things as night vision goggles, weapon optics and communications devices.

It doesn’t sound like much weight, but it adds to the other things Soldiers are hauling like weapons and ammunition, protective gear, and food and water, she said, adding that Soldiers are always trying to be better prepared, so their battery load for a 72-hour mission is probably closer to 25 pounds.

All that added weight means Soldiers can get fatigued much more easily, are more susceptible to injury and are less able to maneuver nimbly, she noted.

By 2025, the wattage and battery weight is expected to roughly double, she said, citing discussions with the Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team and Augmented Reality Cross-Functional Team.

That estimate is based on anticipated power requirements of such gear as new augmented reality equipment and a next-generation squad weapon, she said.

On top of that, discussions are taking place in the Army about the possibility of doubling the duration of the standard 72-hour patrol, said her colleague, Noel Soto, a systems engineer with Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command.

It’s come to the point that Soldiers are losing their battlefield readiness as a result of all of the weight they carry and they are functioning more like “pack animals,” he said.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

Douglas said Army researchers are experimenting with ways to make batteries more powerful and last longer so fewer need to be carried.

To do that, the researchers are trying to make batteries more energy dense by doing such things as replace graphite in batteries with carbon and fluorine gas, and in hybrid batteries use manganese dioxide.

However, the high temperatures required for that process have made them prohibitively expensive, so the researchers are looking for ways to bring the cost down, even as they experiment with other chemicals, she said.

Another solution would be to “add power consumption decision point to acquisition programs,” she said, noting that requirement is currently absent.

Soto said his team in Natick, Massachusetts, is working on a number of experiments to bring down the weight and number of batteries Soldiers must carry. They include:

• Wearable solar panels that are comfortable and flex with the body
• A backpack frame kinetic harvester that produces energy for rechargeable batteries from slight movements of the Soldier’s rucksack during dismounted patrols
• A kinetic knee harvester that produces energy for rechargeable batteries from movements of the Soldier’s legs

The kinetic knee harvesters have received favorable reviews from Soldiers doing user testing, he said. They’re most efficient when Soldiers are moving downhill.

The backpack frame kinetic harvesters are more efficient when Soldiers are going uphill, he said, as that’s when their rucksacks wobble the most. Soldiers are taught to tightly fasten everything down on their person, but in this case, having a loose-fitting rucksack results in more energy-harvesting efficiency. That doesn’t sit well with Soldiers, who prefer the kinetic knee harvesters.

The added benefit of the kinetic knee harvesters is that when Soldiers go downhill, the mechanism helps Soldiers to more efficiently brake so they have a better-controlled descent and reduced fatigue, Soto added.

Power produced by backpack frame kinetic harvesters varies, based on wobble, but it can be anywhere from 8 to 40 watts, he said. Kinetic knee harvesters produce about 6 watts going uphill and 30 watts downhill.

Tesla’s lead in battery technology gives it a cost advantage that may last for several years and help the US electric-car maker face down an onslaught of new competition, according to new research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Power packs made by the US manufacturer and its Japanese partner, Panasonic, require less cobalt, the metal whose price has shot up with demand for electric cars. Chief executive Elon Musk on June 5th said Tesla is targeting a price of $100 per kilowatt-hour for battery cells this year – a level BNEF doesn’t expect the industry standard to drop below until 2025.

“If Tesla reaches its pack-price milestone, it will be several years ahead of our industry benchmark,” BNEF said in the report. The researchers noted that others made batteries for as low as $120 per kilowatt hour in 2017, “which suggests that Tesla is not alone in being ahead of the curve.”

Tesla hasn’t been able to extend its US dominance in electric cars to other regions, and is now under threat from new models coming from European brands like Volkswagen, Daimler, Volvo Cars and BMW. The competition will be toughest in the SUV and crossover segment, where the Model X goes up against new models from Jaguar Land Rover’s I-Pace, Audi’s coming E-Tron and the Hyundai Kona, due in 2019.

With expanded consumer choice, competition will focus not just on the availability of electric cars, “but by more prosaic issues such as price, build quality, aftermarket services and user experience,” the report said. “If Tesla is to maintain its early leadership in the EV industry, it may have some ground to catch up in these areas against the established automakers.”

By contrast, Tesla and China’s BYD are the only two vertically integrated electric-car makers, “which may confer a long-term advantage if battery technology becomes a major differentiator”, the report said.

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BYD is the leader in global electric-car sales, with 9.9 per cent of the market, according to BNEF. Tesla is just behind at 9.7 per cent.

In other areas, the results are mixed. Tesla is improving production of the Model 3 and its products will still stand out through 2020, BNEF said. The company will need significant investments in China and to develop its semi-truck, Model Y and pickup truck, the report said.

Meanwhile, delays to an upgrade of its Autopilot feature and a lack of mobility services leave it behind other carmakers, the report said. The Solar City business it acquired for $2.1 billion hasn’t lived up to expectations. – Bloomberg

Lithium-ion batteries were first introduced to the public in a Sony camcorder in 1991. Then they revolutionized our lives. The versatile batteries now power everything from tiny medical implants and smartphones to forklifts and expensive electric cars. And yet, lithium-ion technology still isn’t powerful enough to fully displace gasoline-powered cars or cheap enough to solve the big energy-storage problem of solar and wind power.

Dave Eaglesham, the CEO of Pellion Technologies, a Massachusetts-based startup, believes his company has made the leap beyond lithium-ion that will bring the battery industry to the next stage of technological disruption. He and his colleagues have accomplished something researchers have been struggling with for decades: they’ve built a reliable rechargeable lithium-metal battery.

Though other startups have for years made various claims about lithium-metal batteries, none yet have gotten past the development or testing phases; Pellion has already been selling their battery to at least one buyer since February.

Pellion’s battery can pack nearly double the energy of a conventional lithium-ion battery, making it able to, for example, double the time a drone can spend in the air. That 100% increase in energy density is a step change compared to the annual 10% or so improvement the battery industry currently averages. If Pellion overcomes early limitations, its batteries have the potential to power a Tesla car for 800 km (500 miles) on a single charge, rather than today’s upper limits of 400 km.

The story of a pivot

The lithium-ion battery is named for its use of charged atoms—also known as “ions”—of lithium. The ions shuttle between two electrodes (the anode and the cathode) as the battery is charged and discharged.

One of the limitations of this tech is that a lithium ion carries only a single positive charge. In theory, simply using magnesium ions—which carry two positive charges—would mean packing in a lot more energy in the battery. In 2011, Robert Doe, a postdoctoral student at MIT, and his then supervising professor Gerd Ceder, founded Pellion with the goal of building a magnesium-ion battery. Within two years, Pellion had a working prototype in the lab. But it had a lot of problems. Though the battery worked, it was no match for lithium-ion batteries on simple things like charging and discharging with consistency.

That’s when Eaglesham joined as CEO. “We had the world’s best magnesium battery, but I couldn’t see how to turn it into a compelling product,” he says. However, Eaglesham noticed that in the process of building a working prototype, Pellion had solved one of the industry’s long-standing challenges for rechargeable batteries: how to put a metal on the anode safely.

Energy-rich metals like lithium and magnesium tend to be highly reactive. And a complete battery, when packed with an energy-dense electrolyte, makes the system even more dangerous. Remember the exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7?

That’s why typical lithium-ion batteries use anodes made of graphite, a form of carbon. But graphite anodes can only store one atom of lithium for every six atoms of carbon. Replace graphite with an anode made entirely of lithium atoms—aka a lithium-metal anode—and you’ve just saved a lot of space in your cell.

In a study published in January this year, Paul Albertus, a program director at the US Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), used this graphic to show how dramatically more energy-dense a lithium-metal battery could be:

Eaglesham made the case to his new colleagues at Pellion that, if they’d found a way to use a metal anode safely, it would be better to pivot to lithium rather than struggle with magnesium. That way, they could take advantage of more than three decades of work done on lithium-ion technology to solve the little but important problems, such as charging consistency or voltage fluctuations, while still creating an energy-dense battery and moving the needle on innovation in the industry.

Trial by fire

Scientists have long understood that a lithium-metal anode would theoretically pack in more energy. In fact, the first lithium-ion cells that oil giant Exxon developed in the 1970s contained lithium-metal anodes. (Exxon was working on batteries then because it worried that oil might run out one day.) Single-use lithium-metal batteries were commercialized about the same time and they are used even today in specialized applications, such as deep-sea drilling.

Commercializing rechargeable lithium-metal batteries is a bigger challenge. In the 1980s, Moli Energy, a Canadian startup, was the first to succeed. But some of its batteries started catching fire, and the company had to issue a recall. The incident led to legal action and Moli Energy was forced to declare bankruptcy.

The use of lithium metal in rechargeable batteries creates three big problems. First, it reacts with everything: water, oxygen, and even nitrogen (all of which are present in the air around us), making it more likely to catch fire.

Second, lithium’s reactivity means it suffers side reactions with the battery’s liquid electrolyte, which is itself an energy-rich medium. These undesirable reactions reduce the amount of lithium available and worsen the battery’s life with every charge-discharge cycle.

Third, when a lithium-metal battery discharges, lithium ions separate from the surface of the anode and travel to the cathode. When the battery is charged the same ions travel back and deposit onto the anode as lithium metal. But instead of forming a nice smooth coating on the anode, lithium metal has the tendency to generate “dendrites,” chains of lithium atoms growing from the surface of the anode, which look like the roots of a tree. The dendrites grow bigger with each charge-discharge cycle, eventually reaching the cathode and causing the battery to short, leading to fires.

As the industry struggled through these problems in the late 1980s, Sony invented the graphite anode. Though less energy-dense, it suddenly made lithium batteries a lot safer and more reliable. Since then, graphite anodes have remained the mainstay of the industry.

Nearly 30 years later, however, we are brushing up against the limitations of the graphite anode. Next-generation applications such as cheap electric cars and electric airplanes will need batteries that carry the same amount of energy but weigh a lot less and take up a fraction of the space of today’s batteries. A slew of companies are in a race to build the next revolutionary anode, and venture capitalists are pumping in hundreds of millions of dollars in the hope of making a winning bet.

The zero-lithium state

To counteract lithium’s high reactivity, some battery developers have tried to install additional safety equipment to keep the lithium from coming into direct contact with water, oxygen, or nitrogen inside the battery. That inevitably increases the cost of manufacturing.

Some customers, such as commercial-drone users, are willing to pay premium prices. But Eaglesham believes it also means such battery makers don’t have a business that can scale beyond niche markets.

Even if somehow the costs could be reined in, batteries with lithium metal inside are less likely to pass safety tests, according to Eaglesham. These tests are designed to put the battery in extreme, but real-life, conditions: piercing a nail into the battery (which might happen in a car accident) or heating it to more than 50°C, or 122°F (a temperature that the interiors of cars or drones can easily reach).

The industry is littered with examples of companies that tried to build a lithium-metal battery but failed. For example, Arizona-based Sion Power built a lithium-sulfur battery (where the anode is lithium metal and cathode is made of sulfur) and used it for record-setting unmanned autonomous vehicles flights. But it abandoned the technology before reaching commercial scale. (It is still trying to develop lithium-metal batteries, but this time with a different cathode.)

That’s why Pellion’s battery doesn’t start with lithium metal inside. Instead, the battery is manufactured in the exact same way as a conventional lithium-ion battery, including using a liquid electrolyte, a widely available cathode—and an anode that begins its life as a copper sheet. That’s crucial because it allows Pellion to use existing lithium-ion battery factories in Asia, where it’s much cheaper to manufacture batteries.

In its discharged state, the Pellion battery has its lithium ions sitting snugly inside the cathode. The magic happens when the battery is charged for the first time, and the lithium ions travel from the cathode and deposit as a layer of lithium metal on the copper anode. The first charge is carried out in a state when the battery is completely sealed from the outside environment, and thus the newly formed layer of lithium metal is protected. This configuration is called “zero-lithium” or “lithium-free.”

“It is quite an impressive feat,” says Venkat Viswanathan, a battery expert at Carnegie Mellon University. Another expert (who asked not to be named due to press restrictions at their lab) called it the “holy grail” of the lithium-metal battery.

Market niche to market king

Pellion’s battery does have limitations. It typically takes three hours to charge the battery fully, and it’s not cheap. While experts Quartz spoke to about Pellion’s battery were impressed by the achievement, many expressed concerns about the limited number of life cycles: it can only guarantee 50 charge-discharge life cycles.

That’s much lower than the approximately 300 life cycles needed for a battery to go in a smartphone or the 1,000 life cycles required for electric cars. Eaglesham says the company’s latest models in development can last much more than 50 charge-discharge lifecycles than the batteries it sells. But Viswanathan says that going from 50 life cycles to 500 is a much harder proposition than what Pellion has achieved so far. Steven Visco agrees. He is the CEO of PolyPlus, a California-based startup, and he thinks that using a liquid electrolyte, which Pellion’s battery does, fundamentally limits how many lifecycles a lithium-metal battery could achieve.

That said, “battery startups struggle to find customers for their early products,” says Venkat Srinivasan, a lead battery researcher at Argonne National Laboratory. “So it’s an achievement that Pellion is already shipping product.” Quartz reached out to 10 other startups working on lithium-metal batteries for comment, and got replies from six. Sion Power, PolyPlus, Solid Energy Systems, and Ion Storage Systems said they are in the validation phase, sending engineering prototypes to potential customers and third-party testers. QuantumScape and Blue Current declined to comment.

Delivery of a lithium-metal battery product is a “major breakthrough,” says Eaglesham. Pellion’s first customers are makers of commercial drones. (Quartz was shown documents confirming sales on the condition of keeping the buyer’s identity confidential.) The startup began selling its batteries in February this year, and it expects to have several million dollars in revenue by the end of the year.

“Current battery technology underserves the drone market,” says Eaglesham. “We’ve found that some users have such a hunger for longer flight times that the number of battery life cycles doesn’t matter.”

The biggest prize for battery companies right now is the electric-car market. Bloomberg New Energy Finance expects that 10% of all cars sold in 2025 will be electric. To meet that demand, the battery industry will have to quintuple in size and produce some $60 billion worth of batteries annually.

Given the limitations, Eaglesham isn’t thinking about electric cars just yet. But his battery’s specifications make it a good candidate. For comparison, lithium-ion cells in electric cars like Tesla stand at 600 watt-hours per liter (Wh/l) and 220 watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg). Pellion’s figures are nearly double: 1,000 Wh/l and 400 Wh/kg. The promise of a leap in battery technology has allowed the startup to raise “tens of millions” of dollars, says Eaglesham, from the likes of Khosla Ventures and Motorola Solutions.

Beyond the hype

As a fast-growing industry with the potential of creating billion-dollar companies, battery inventors are known to operate in secrecy. But that means, without proper third-party verification, it’s hard to separate the truth from hype. That’s why it’s not surprising so many promising battery startups have gone bust in the past decade alone.

In 2012, for example, Envia was among the first crown jewels of the then three-year-old US advanced energy program (ARPA-E). Envia promised a lithium-ion technology that would make a leap in energy density and thus slash the cost of electric cars. It even convinced General Motors to sign a deal and invest millions of dollars. At the time, the car giant desperately needed a new battery for the next-generation Chevy Volt that was due in 2016. But after raising nearly $30 million and spending 10 years in operation, Envia fell short on delivering its magical battery and went out of business in 2017.

So Pellion’s claims need to be taken with a grain of salt. The only independent academic who has seen Pellion’s technology in action declined to comment for this story. Eaglesham says the company’s customers have validated its technology, but he declined to put Quartz in touch with them, citing confidentiality agreements.

Other experts Quartz consulted back the credentials of Eaglesham and his team. Pellion’s co-founders may have been first-time entrepreneurs; in Eaglesham, however, they have an experienced hand.

Eaglesham was previously the chief technology officer of First Solar, which proved itself a rare success in the cut-throat solar-photovoltaic-cell business. Co-founder Gerd Ceder now sits on Pellion’s board of directors, and he says that Eaglesham has been successful at Pellion because he has a handle on both commercial and technical aspects.

“Commercializing batteries is an extremely hard problem. Most startups end up in bullshit land,” Ceder says. “They are run by CEOs who are all about raising money and ratcheting up the stakes…before the crash. Pellion is different.”

The volunteer Fire Department in Indian Harbour Beach, on Florida’s famous Space Coast, reached out to the community to learn more about Teslas and electric vehicles (EVs). The Fire Department reached out to the community, asking for volunteers to bring their vehicles to the station to help firefighters learn about how to respond to the new electric vehicles in the event of an accident or vehicle fire.

The department put out a call to the community via its social media channels and was rewarded with overwhelming support from the community.

Click Orlando related that, “Tesla cars are 10 times less likely to catch fire than gasoline-fueled cars, [Tesla] said, citing data from the National Fire Protection Association and U.S. Federal Highway Administration. Lithium-ion batteries, like those in Tesla cars, also ignite more slowly and burn in a more controlled way than gasoline.”

Nevertheless, it is training like this that equips fire departments to be able to respond to and to effectively fight a fire in a Tesla vehicle. Recent fires and responses have revealed that while fires in Teslas are indeed far less likely to happen, fire departments still have some room to improve in terms of how they respond to them. Similarly, scrap and impound yards have to become aware of the vulnerabilities and potential liability of hosting a scrapped plug-in electric vehicle.

The Indian Harbour Beach Fire Department’s training shows that some stations are already working to bridge the gap and to meet the rapidly growing number of plug-in vehicles roaming the streets halfway.

The redditor who shared the event noted that along with the vehicles being present, an expert presented the specific differences with EVs. “He gave a presentation on each model and the different safety aspects of each (battery cut off, popping the hood, where to cut etc) and after let them interact with us owners and ask questions about the car. This was a great night and I hope more Fire Departments are just as forward thinking about the future as EVs become more and more mainstream!”

German carmaker Mercedes-Benz will unveil an all-electric vehicle (EV) at a launch event in Stockholm, Sweden, on Tuesday.

The EQC is a battery electric vehicle and the first model from Daimler-owned Mercedes’ new product and technology brand, EQ. It will be released on the market in 2019.

The vehicle has undergone winter testing followed by summer trials in the heat of Spain. The car’s unveiling is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. local time (12:30 p.m. ET).

Mercedes’ launch of the EQC is the latest attempt by more established, traditional carmakers to challenge the dominance of Elon Musk’s Tesla.

On Monday, Audi began mass production of its e-tron, the brand’s first totally electric sport utility vehicle (SUV). That car will be officially unveiled in San Francisco on September 17.

A number of major businesses have invested in the EV sector recently. Earlier this summer, oil giant BP entered into an agreement to purchase EV charging business Chargemaster. And, in early August, global energy and services business Centrica made a “multi-million pound” investment in Israeli start-up Driivz, which specializes in end-to-end software solutions for electric EV charging.

Audi began production of its first all-electric SUV on Monday, three years after the German automaker unveiled a concept version of the vehicle at the International Motor Show in Frankfurt.

The company won’t reveal the production-version of the Audi e-tron SUV until Sept. 17, in a what promises to be a splashy event in San Francisco.

Audi, which is owned by Volkswagen Group, has been working towards mass production of the e-tron quattro for years now, offering periodic updates and teasers on the pricing, range, and interior design. The Audi e-tron is being produced at Audi’s factory in Brussels, which has been undergoing an extensive renovation since 2016 to prepare for the new vehicle. The Brussels factor has become the cornerstone of Volkswagen Group’s electric vehicle plans.

Audi rebuilt the body shop, paint shop and assembly line at the Brussels factory, the company said. It also set up its own battery production there.

The five-seater SUV will have DC fast-charging capability of up 150 kilowatts. The company has previously said the SUV would have a 95 kwh battery with a range of more than 500 kilometers (about 310 miles). That range has since been adjusted to somewhere around 250 miles, although the global reveal later this month should provide finalized numbers. Sales of the e-tron SUV are expected to begin by the end of the year.

The Audi e-tron is the first in what the company says will be a new line of all-electric vehicles. By 2020, Audi plans to also produce a four-door Gran Turismo (the production version of the Audi e-tron Sportback concept) and a compact vehicle. The company has outlined plans to launch more than 20 electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids by 2025.