Lithium News

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:The Lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery developed by ISRO’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) has drawn overwhelming response from private players across the country. VSSC had floated an RFQ (request for quotation) for the technology transfer.

Top VSSC officers said more than 130 firms have shown a keen interest in the battery which is expected to spur the country’s electric vehicle technology in the near future.The response has been so overwhelming that the VSSC — Isro’s lead centre for launch vehicles — has decided to convene a pre-application conference on Tuesday.

Around 250 senior executives and technocrats from the 130-plus firms are expected to attend the conference, VSSC officers said. The conference will highlight various aspects of the technology transfer process and guide prospective bidders in preparing their proposals.VSSC is also thrilled by the fact the response to the RFQ is an all-time record for an Isro technology transfer programme.

The Li-ion battery was developed by VSSC some years ago, but attempts to draw private partners for its commercial production had not succeeded back then.However, with the country poised to welcome electric vehicles and green energy in a big way, the Centre developed a keen interest in the technology. The NITI Aayog had convened a meeting which was attended by senior Isro brass. The battery has already been successfully tested and used in space missions.

The success of electric car batteries depends on the miles that can be driven on a single charge, but the current crop of lithium-ion batteries are reaching their natural limit of how much charge can be packed into any given space, keeping drivers on a short tether. Now, researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD), the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL), and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) have figured out how to increase a rechargeable battery’s capacity by using aggressive electrodes and then stabilizing these potentially dangerous electrode materials with a highly-fluorinated electrolyte.

A peer-reviewed paper based on the research was published July 16 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

“We have created a fluorine-based electrolyte to enable a lithium-metal anode, which is known to be notoriously unstable, and demonstrated a battery that lasts up to a thousand cycles with high capacity,” said co-first authors Xiulin Fan and Long Chen, postdoctoral researchers at UMD’s A. James Clark School of Engineering.

The new batteries can thus charge and discharge many times over without losing the ability to provide a reliable and high quality stream of energy. Even after a thousand charge cycles, the fluorine enhanced electrolytes ensured 93% of battery capacity, which the authors call “unprecedented.” This means that a car running on this technology would reliably drive the same number of miles for many years.

“The cycle lives they achieved with the given electrode materials and operation voltage windows sound ‘unprecedented.’ This work is a [sic] great progress forward in the battery field in the direction of increasing the energy density, although further tuning might be needed to meet various standards for commercialization,” said Jang Wook Choi, an associate professor in chemical and biological engineering at Seoul National University in South Korea. Choi was not involved with the research.

The team demonstrated the batteries in coin-cell shape like a watch battery for testing and is working with industry partners to use the electrolytes for a high voltage battery.

These aggressive materials, such as the lithium-metal anode and nickel and high-voltage cathode materials, are called such because they react strongly with other material, meaning that they can hold a lot of energy but also tend to “eat up” any other elements they’re partnered with, rendering them unusable.

Chunsheng Wang, professor in the Clark School’s Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, has collaborated with Kang Xu at ARL and Khalil Amine at ANL on these new electrolyte materials for batteries. Since each element on the periodic table has a different arrangement of electrons, Wang studies how each permutation of chemical structure can be an advantage or disadvantage in a battery. He and Xu also head up an industry-university-government collaborative effort called the Center for Research in Extreme Batteries, which aims to unite companies that need batteries for unusual uses with the researchers who can invent them.

“The aim of the research was to overcome the capacity limitation that lithium-ion batteries experience. We identified that fluorine is the key ingredient that ensures these aggressive chemistries behave reversibly to yield long battery life. An additional merit of fluorine is that it makes the usually combustible electrolytes completely unable to catch on fire,” said Wang.

The team captured video of several battery cells catching on fire in instants, but the fluorine battery was impervious.

The high population of fluorine-containing species in the interphases is the key to making the material work, even though results have varied for different researchers in the past regarding the fluorination.

“You can find evidences from literature that either support or disapprove fluorine as good ingredient in interphases,” said Xu, laboratory fellow and team leader of the research at ARL. “What we learned in this work is that, in most cases it is not just what chemical ingredients you have in the interphase, but how they are arranged and distributed.”

Penske Truck Leasing is preparing to dive deeper into medium- and heavy-duty battery-electric trucks as a trickle of the alternatively powered vehicles begin to find their way in a world where diesel will remain trucking’s main fuel for quite a while, company executives said.

A changeover on a large scale to battery-electric trucks will be a huge undertaking, according to Penske.

“When you think about the enormous amounts of energy required to charge the battery-electric vehicles and the unknown cost component for developing long-term viable solutions that will meet every single customer’s needs — you know those are some big things that the industry really needs to work on and iron out,” Andrew Cullen, senior vice president of fuels and facility services at Penske Truck Leasing, told Transport Topics.

“Do we think it can be done? Absolutely. It’s just a matter of when and how and [for] how much money,” Cullen added.

Penske will receive 10 eCascadias and 10 eM2s for use in California and the Pacific Northwest by the end of the year as Daimler Trucks North America field tests its Freightliner Electric Innovation Fleet.

Overall, Penske has 270,000 vehicles in Class 1 through Class 8 from a wide range of manufacturers, and Cullen expects that diversified approach would not change as more electrified trucks emerge.

“The challenges that some of the entrants face is not necessarily the architecture, the design, the manufacturing of the vehicles — it’s really the support mechanism after the sale, whether it be parts or service centers or trained technicians. It’s something they have to overcome versus somebody who has been at this a long time like DTNA,” Cullen said.

That service will include working on hazardous high-voltage charging systems that are far more powerful than batteries used in other commercial vehicles now.

Electrical hazards can cause burns, shocks and electrocution, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

“From everybody we have talked to and some of the current product we have — you are looking 600 to 700 volts from a source standpoint [with battery-electric trucks]. So obviously there has to be a lot of safety training that takes place, even for somebody just working in a facility with these kinds of vehicles, to understand the do’s and don’ts,” said Mike Hasinec, vice president of maintenance at Penske Truck Leasing.

Penske plans to train employees on how to disconnect the main power source, and change out the batteries and some of the modules that would be connected to those batteries, for instance, Hasinec said.

The National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence is looking at creating specifics for working with these battery-electric systems, he said. ASE has had certifications for diagnosis and repairs on hybrid-electric vehicles, mainly passenger cars, since 2014.

Meanwhile, it may be time to take a breath, Hasinec suggested.

“At the end of the day, I think people look at this and over-complicate [truck electrification]. Because these vehicles are going to still have a lot of the same attributes or components as a diesel,” he said.

That includes brakes, air conditioning, lights, power steering and more. “The only real difference is the powertrain,” he said.

It will take 20 years to build a good, solid infrastructure to support a battery-electric Class 8 tractor going from Reading, Pa. — where Penske is headquartered — to Los Angeles, he added.

“Diesel is not going anywhere for quite a while,” said Hasinec.

Amy Prieto decided to pursue battery research when she started as an assistant professor of chemistry at Colorado State University in 2005. The field was a perfect bridge between her Ph.D. studies in solid-state materials for electronic devices and her postdoctoral work in measuring transport properties of nanostructured materials. It turned out to be a fruitful decision. She has patented novel battery materials and a unique manufacturing process that together revamp decades-old lithium-ion technology. Her lithium-ion battery, built on a foundation of electroplated copper foam, is more flexible, safer, less expensive, and more environmentally friendly than batteries currently on the market.

In 2009, just four years after embarking on her research, she founded a company, Prieto Battery, to develop the technology for commercial use. The start-up caught the eyes of the power-tool manufacturer Stanley Black & Decker and the computer technology giant Intel, both of which invested in the technology in 2016. Prachi Patel talked with Prieto about her innovative technology and business plans.

Why give lithium-ion batteries a makeover?

Current batteries are limited by their materials and architectures. In your cell phone or laptop, you have a battery made of flat layers. If you want it to store a lot of energy, you have to make the layers thick, which means the battery doesn’t charge very quickly. And if you want to make it fast, you have to make those layers thin, but then you cannot store very much energy.

We wanted to make a device without these trade-offs so your phone battery could last a whole day and you’d be able to charge it in 10 minutes instead of an hour. That’s critical for larger-scale energy storage applications like electric vehicles or my ultimate dream: battery banks for wind and solar farms.

How did you start thinking about this problem?

Originally, I was not thinking about something that could be commercialized quickly but was looking for enriching research for my students and postdocs. From the beginning, we wanted a manufacturing method that was scalable and environmentally friendly and did not require expensive capital equipment, high temperatures, or long processing times. So we decided on electroplating, a really good method to deposit ions from a solution onto an immersed surface using electric current. It’s never been used for batteries, but it is used for coating jewelry, car parts, and interconnects on semiconductor chips.

Today’s batteries use flat metal sheets that are coated with anode and cathode materials. We start with a three-dimensional copper foam, which has a high surface area because it is porous, so you can get more capacity in the same footprint as a standard battery. But you can still have fast charge and discharge because ions move through the porous foam easily.

The foam goes into our electroplating bath containing an aqueous solution of citric acid with dissolved copper and antimony salts. Those salts deposit on the foam surface as copper antimonide, a known anode material. All these materials are nontoxic. Antimony by itself is not the most environmentally friendly, but it’s very stable in copper antimonide. Next, we electrochemically coat the foam with a proprietary polymer that we formulated, which acts as the electrolyte and the electrode separator. Finally, we coat the foam with a slurry of cathode materials, including lithium cobalt oxide and lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide, which we buy from suppliers.

Many others are pursuing novel lithium battery chemistries. What gives your design an edge?

A key aspect is that electroplating allows us to customize our battery volume and make it in a variety of sizes and shapes. We can control the thickness of the anode coating based on the amount of charge we pass during electroplating. There are many applications, such as wearable devices, where device designers are limited because they cannot find batteries that conform to the volume requirements. We can let designers daydream and make a battery that fits their space constraint.

Another big advantage of our battery is safety. Most batteries today have graphite anodes. If you overcharge them, you can get lithium plating on the graphite surface. These metal deposits form spiky growths called dendrites that cause a short circuit, which can lead to battery fires. Copper antimonide takes up lithium ions during charging in a way that doesn’t allow lithium plating. It is also thermally conductive, so it dissipates heat and helps the battery handle overheating. Plus, this is a solid-state battery, so we don’t have flammable liquid electrolytes.

Some people in the battery industry are working on new chemistries that are critical for technologies that we will need in 10–20 years. And others are optimizing the engineering of current batteries to get a couple percent improvement every year. We fall between those two. We provide the next step for lithium-ion batteries by mostly using chemistry that’s understood today. Our technology is something that can be commercialized in the near future.

My business partner and I have a goal to have our very first batteries on the market within this calendar year. Most start-ups raise a lot of money and build a whole facility. We decided to instead raise only what we needed as we went and then to try to focus on establishing partnerships. We targeted companies that really needed new batteries. Intel is interested in flexible battery sizes and formats for computing devices. Stanley Black & Decker makes things you’d imagine on a construction site, and the company is interested in power and safety. So the markets are different but complementary in that they both place a high value on tech and innovation.

Our manufacturing partner is Moses Lake Industries, which develops electroplating chemicals and processes for companies like Intel and Samsung. They are scaling up the process, so we don’t have to build a new facility. Electroplating is used in a variety of industries, so we don’t foresee any real technical challenges.

German battery systems maker Akasol on Monday said it has developed the second-generation lithium-ion battery systems for Mercedes-Benz’ e-bus eCitaro.

In autumn, serial production of the first-generation battery system AKASYSTEM OEM will begin in Langen (Hesse, Germany).

AKASOL has started to develop second-generation lithium-ion battery systems in close cooperation with Daimler Buses.

Being upwards compatible, these will offer about 35 percent more energy and contribute to an improved range in 2020, the company said in a release.

Instead of currently 25 kilowatt hours storage capacity per battery pack, the second generation will be able to store 33 kilowatt hours per battery pack.

This means an increase of 35 percent from 243 to 330 kilowatt hours per vehicle while maintaining the same constructed space, weight and upwards compatibility.

“In addition to improved battery cells many other small optimisations, for instance in the battery management system and the mechanical architecture, contribute to the improvements of the second-generation systems,” said AKASOL CEO Sven Schulz.

He further said since the beginning of our partnership in 2015 we have developed great mutual trust, which we see as a wonderful acknowledgement of our products and company.

Promethient, an early stage U.S-based company that developed graphene-enhanced seat warmer technology, has received a large (though undisclosed) equity investment from Faurecia Ventures, the investment arm of Nanterre, France-based Faurecia, the sixth-largest auto supplier in the world, with a big American presence.

The funding will allow Promethient to ramp up product development and marketing and also provides it with a very large early customer. The investment will also allow Promethient to sell to other auto suppliers and makers.

The company also reported a contract with El Tigre Golf Seats of Elkhart, Ind., to provide graphene-based assemblies, with production to begin in August. However, Bill Myers, Promethient’s CEO, said it will be at least two years before Promethient’s technology is in the auto marketplace.

Myers said Promethient is targeting four major markets — transportation, including off-road, agricultural and aviation; furniture; medical devices; and garments for the military, police and athletes. He said he has one deal with a manufacturer of power-sports vehicles he isn’t allowed to name and has a prototype being evaluated by a major furniture maker.

“The Northern Michigan Angels like to invest in companies that have more than one application for the technology along with having a management team that can prioritize and bring in sales quickly,” said Deanna Cannon, the angels’ executive director. “Promethient has a great management team that is pursuing a short-term path to cash-flow positive results.”

Myers said the company has begun generating modest nonrecurring revenue from engineering projects being paid for by customers and expects revenue to ramp up quickly.