Lithium News

A research team led by scientists from Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China, has used the Australian Synchrotron in developing a novel strategy for the scalable production of high-performance, thin, and free-standing lithium anodes for lithium-ion batteries with enhanced cycling stability and electrochemical properties.

The work was undertaken to meet the growing demand for high-performance lithium-ion batteries. Solid-state lithium metal has a high energy density and high capacity theoretically, making it an ideal replacement for traditional graphite anodes.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, the team reported that a special zinc additive dialkyl dithiophosphate (ZDDP) enhanced the performance of thin lithium metal strips.

The research demonstrated that the additive increased hardness at the interface, prevented structural degradation (growth of lithium dendrites), controlled the deposition of lithium during plating/stripping, and the lithium anode could be plated and stripped faster than other materials.

The team produced thin lithium strips with thicknesses ranging from 5 to 50 micrometers, with better mechanical strength, electrochemical performance and impressive cycling stability compared to untreated lithium strips.

A cycle lifetime of up to 2,800 hours was maintained even at a high area capacity. Additionally, a symmetrical cell based on ultrathin lithium strips with 15 micrometers thickness lasted for more than 800 hours.

The study also included a full cell configuration using LiFePO4(LFP) and ZDDP-coated lithium, showing excellent cycling life with over 83.2% capacity retention after 350 cycles. In comparison, a cell without ZDDP degraded rapidly.

The improved electrochemical characteristics of the ZDDP-coated lithium anode were attributed to the creation of a high-strength artificial solid electrolyte interface (SEI) layer with a high affinity for lithium.

Instrument scientist Dr. Bernt Johannessen said this was an example of innovative work in the development of ultra-thin lithium, only microns thick that is manufactured for solid-state batteries.

For this study, a zinc-based oil was developed and used during the production process, in which the lithium is rolled out thinner and thinner, similar to how you roll dough through a pasta machine.

Samples were mailed to the synchrotron, and Dr. Johannessen undertook the measurements of the lithium anodes using the X-ray absorption spectroscopy beamline, which has proved particularly useful in investigating energy materials and catalysis.

So much so that the beamline has produced nearly twice the number of publications through 2023 as compared to the previous year.

“On that note, we owe our user community a debt of gratitude; they are being wonderfully productive and taking full advantage of recent developments, such as fast scanning techniques, at the beamline,” said Dr. Johannessen.

JAC Group’s Yiwei, a new EV brand in China backed by Volkswagen, debuted the first sodium-ion battery-powered electric car. The new JAC Yiwei EV rolled off the assembly line Wednesday.

Yiwei is a new EV maker under the JAC Group. It was established earlier this year. Volkswagen owns 50% of JAC’s parent company; the other 50% is state-owned.

Volkswagen invested 1 billion euros for a 50% stake in JAC Group in 2021. The German automaker also took full control of management of its existing EV joint venture with a 75% stake.

The new EV features sodium-ion cylindrical cells from HiNa Battery. The Beijing-based tech company is affiliated with the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

It will use JAC’s UE module tech, a honey-comb battery structure. JAC’s UE is similar to BYD’s Blade battery, which is used in Toyota, Kia, and Ford EVs. It can also be compared to CATL’s CTP (cell-to-pack) technology.

Deliveries of the new sodium battery-powered Yiwei electric vehicle are expected to begin next month.

First sodium-ion battery-powered EV rolls out

JAC introduced the Yiwei 3, the first EV powered by a sodium-ion battery, at the Shanghai Auto Show in February. However, the model launched with an LFP battery, with JAC promising a sodium-ion version was coming.

The automaker also revealed the sodium-ion-battery-powered Sehol E10X, featuring 25 kWh of capacity and 120 Wh/kg of energy density. With 3C to 4C charging, the electric hatchback could recharge from 10% to 80% in 20 minutes.

Volkswagen transferred the Sehol brand to JAC in 2021. Earlier this year, JAC said all vehicles would wear either a JAC or Yiwei badge.

Although sodium-ion batteries have a lower energy density than lithium-ion ones, they do offer several advantages. According to JAC, they have better low-temperature performance, faster charging speeds, longer lifespans, and increased durability over time.

Perhaps most importantly, the batteries use cheaper raw materials, which can enable lower EV prices.

“Sodium-ion batteries will become an important battery type, complementary to LFP batteries, and a low-cost solution that promotes the popularization of mass electric vehicles to masses,” said the chairman of Yiwei Tech, Xia Shunli.

JAC Motors, a Volkswagen-backed Chinese automaker, is set to launch the first mass-produced electric vehicle (EV) with a sodium-ion battery through its new Yiwei brand. Although sodium-ion battery tech has a lower density (and is less mature) than lithium-ion, its lower costs, more abundant supplies and superior cold-weather performance could help accelerate mass EV adoption. CarNewsChina reports that the JAC Yiwei EV hatchback deliveries will begin in January.

Yiwei is a new brand in 2023 for JAC. Volkswagen has a 75 percent stake in (and management control of) JAC and owns 50 percent of JAC’s parent company, Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group Holdings (JAG). The Chinese government owns the other half of JAG, making for one of the auto industry’s stranger pairings.

The Yiwei EV appears to be a rebranded version of the Sehol E10X hatchback (above), announced earlier this year. CarNewsChina describes the Sehol model as having a 252 km (157 miles) range with a 25 kWh capacity, 120 Wh / kg energy density, 3C to 4C charging, and a HiNa NaCR32140 cell. When JAC revealed the Yiwei brand in May, it said it would drop the Sehol label and rebrand all its vehicles to either JAC or Yiwei, leading us to this week’s EV reveal. JAC hasn’t yet said whether the Yiwei-branded model will keep the E10X moniker.

In April, JAC showcased a separate EV called the Yiwei 3 at the Shanghai Auto Show. That model launched in June with an LFP lithium battery, promising the sodium-ion variant would launch later.

The new Yiwei EV reportedly uses cylindrical sodium-ion cells from HiNA Battery. JAC assembles the batteries in the company’s modular UE (Unitized Encapsulation) honeycomb structure, similar to CATL’s CTP (cell-to-pack) and BYD’s Blade. The layout can provide for greater stability and performance.

When it comes to rare-earth elements (REEs), lithium stands out because of its usefulness and potential value. That’s why the Department of Energy (DOE) was jumping for joy when it discovered what is believed to be the world’s largest supply of lithium beneath California’s Salton Sea. The estimated 18 million-ton motherlode could be worth up to $540 billion and meet America’s demand for decades to come.

In the 1990s, lithium was perhaps most famous for being the title of a hit song by the band Nirvana. Fast forward 30 years, and Lithium has become famous as an indispensable element in the multibillion-dollar renewable energy industry. Lithium is a key component of the rechargeable batteries that power things like electric cars. Production of other important consumer products like cellular phones and solar energy panels also requires large amounts of lithium.

Without enough Lithium to power those batteries and other innovations, the world’s effort to fight climate change through renewable energy will be hampered. In a recent report, high-ranking DOE official Jeff Marootian said, “Lithium is vital to decarbonizing the economy and meeting President Biden’s goals of 50% electric vehicle adoption by 2030.” The problem with that is China currently dominates the global production of lithium.

A global rival such as China controlling the world’s supply of lithium runs counter to America’s strategic and economic interests. That’s why the DOE has been funding the exploration of lithium sources inside the United States. As part of that effort, it gave a $14.9 million grant to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy to study the area surrounding the Salton Sea, which straddles Riverside and Imperial counties in the California desert.

California Gov. Gavin Newsome was touring the Salton Sea with President Joe Biden to tout America’s renewable energy industry when he referred to the area as “t “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.” If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider that the DOE estimates there is enough lithium beneath the Salton Sea to provide batteries for more than 375 million electric vehicles (EVs).

The estimated 18 million tons of lithium would put America firmly in the lead in terms of supplying the global market. It could turbocharge EV and solar production and has the potential to give the United States an unprecedented level of energy independence.

If the lithium beneath the Salton Sea can be harvested and brought to market, America would no longer have to rely on nations like Saudi Arabia and China for its energy or automaking needs. America would also be much richer because lithium is worth an estimated $29,000 per ton. That would make the Salton Sea’s estimated 18 million gallons worth $540 billion.

A partnership between the U.S. government and Buffett has the potential to increase America’s production of lithium and profitability for the industry. That’s why Berkshire Hathaway Energy is hard at work. The company operates 10 of the Salton Sea’s geothermal power plants.

It is not alone. EnergySource and Controlled Thermal Resources are also operating in the area. If America becomes the global leader in lithium production, it could lead to a boom of lithium-based businesses that could add billions or trillions of dollars per year to the U.S. economy.

In a typical battery, charged ions zip one way through a sea of other particles as the battery recharges, before racing back in the other direction to release the stored energy on cue.

Back and forth the ions go, some getting diverted along the way, until the capacity of the battery is drained, and it loses energy too quickly to be of any use.

But physicists, good on them, are imagining new ways of storing energy in handy portable devices by drawing on a strange quantum phenomenon that twists time, amongst other unusual happenings.

“Current batteries for low-power devices, such as smartphones or sensors, typically use chemicals such as lithium to store charge, whereas a quantum battery uses microscopic particles like arrays of atoms,” explains Yuanbo Chen, a physics graduate student at the University of Tokyo.

In their latest work, Chen teamed up with physicist Gaoyan Zhu of the Beijing Computational Science Research Centre, part of the China Academy of Engineering Physics, and colleagues to test the idea of creating a quantum battery that allows for simultaneous charging stages, thereby improving energy storage and thermal efficiency.

“While chemical batteries are governed by classical laws of physics, microscopic particles are quantum in nature, so we have a chance to explore ways of using them that bend or even break our intuitive notions of what takes place at small scales,” Chen says.

Chen, Zhu and colleagues certainly aren’t the first group to imagine how a quantum battery might work, but they have tested their ideas experimentally in a lab bench set-up full of spaced-out lasers, lenses, and mirrors.

In 2019, a team of Canadian-based researchers laid out a blueprint for a quantum battery that never loses its charge. Their idea, which is still totally theoretical, hinges on a different quantum mechanism: one that involves luring quantum components into a ‘dark state’ where the material can’t interact with, or lose energy to, its environment.

Zhu and colleagues’ approach follows on from a quantum phenomenon known as superposition, which is commonly recalled for quantum computing, and is where particles exist in a flurry of possible states until the moment they’re measured.

This overlay of possibilities also messes with the natural order of time, researchers have recently shown.

In classical physics and everyday life, events can only occur in a linear fashion or fixed order. Think cause before effect, or event A (flicking a switch) before event B (the light turns on).

In the quantum realm, however, that linear order breaks down and superposition allows for events to unfold along two parallel paths at once. In a way, this messes with time because an event that follows another can also influence the event’s outcome as if it came before, because both orders of events, A before B and B before A, are simultaneously true.

“Putting it simply, it has been found that the laws of quantum mechanics allow for quantum superposition of causal orders,” Zhu and colleagues explain.

To apply that to energy storage, the researchers realized this strange process using a quantum switch, tested a few different charger configurations, and created a system capable of pulling from two chargers simultaneously.

“We demonstrated that the way you charge a battery made up of quantum particles could drastically impact its performance,” says Chen. “We saw huge gains in both the energy stored in the system and the thermal efficiency.”

“Moreover, we reveal a counterintuitive effect that a relatively less powerful charger guarantees a charged battery with more energy at a higher efficiency,” the researchers report in their paper.

While this quantum ‘battery’ is more like a network of lasers on a lab bench, and years away from any practical applications, it’s still a cool demonstration of the underlying principles and what could be possible sometime in the future – if it hasn’t already happened in the past.

The study has been published in Physical Review Letters.

A team of international scientists have developed an ultra-high speed signal processor that can analyze 400,000 real time video images concurrently, according to a paper published in Communications Engineering.

The team, led by Swinburne University of Technology’s Professor David Moss, have developed a processor that operates more than 10,000 times faster than typical electronic processors that operate in Gigabyte/s, at a record 17 Terabits/s (trillion bits per second).

The technology has profound implications for the safety and efficiency of driverless cars, medical imaging and could help find habitable planets beyond our solar system.

“This is a game-changer,” says Moss. “These are portable, ultra-precise optical rulers that could be used for everything from handheld breath scanners to detecting small movements of objects in space or finding Earth-like exoplanets.”

The processor’s efficiency and speed will have a major impact on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and robotic vision. The ability to process vast amounts of data in real-time will lead to more intelligent, autonomous robotic systems that can operate efficiently in real-world environments.

In astronomy, for example, processing large volumes of celestial data at unprecedented speeds will support groundbreaking discoveries. This approach will also accelerate functions of medical imaging and autonomous vehicles.

All real-time analysis and decision-making requires ultrafast analysis of video images for everything from autonomous driving to artificial intelligence in order to detect and analyze objects.”

“The secret to its remarkable performance lies in the integrated optical microcomb, which overcomes the bandwidth and energy limitations inherent in electronics,” says Moss.

Moss says this photonic signal processor is not just a technological marvel—it’s a harbinger of a future where high-speed, efficient data processing shapes every aspect of our lives.

“From transforming transportation and health care to opening new doors in space exploration and AI, the impact of this technology will be profound and far-reaching.”