Lithium News

Lithium-ion batteries are one of the newest trends in power management. Why should IT professionals pay attention?

We know power management is just a small subset of what IT professionals manage, and we also know they need to be cautious about quickly moving to the “latest and greatest” technology before there are proven benefits. It may be difficult to know which innovations are worth it.

Innovations are worth consideration when they save time and money, and reduce risk for IT professionals. When it comes to power protection, today’s IT professionals demand solutions that allow them to set up easily and require minimal maintenance.

Once installed, an uninterruptible power system (UPS) must be capable of delivering long-term, reliable performance on its own — a requirement optimized by lithium-ion batteries. Representing one of the most significant advancements in UPS technology, lithium-ion batteries offer numerous benefits, including doubled or greater lifespan, high energy density, flexible installation and lower total cost of ownership.

Unlike their valve-regulated lead acid (VRLA) counterparts, which generally need to be replaced every three to four years, lithium-ion batteries boast an average lifespan of 10 years, thereby appreciably reducing operating costs. Even more, lithium-ion performs a safer, faster recharge following power disruptions, reducing vulnerability and improving runtime. Approximately 60% smaller and 40% lighter than lead acid, lithium-ion batteries also ease deployment and installation.

What are some of the considerations for IT professionals when evaluating what types of batteries will best serve their needs?

IT professionals seeking to support power grid applications, optimize refresh cycles or ease deployment challenges will find lithium-ion batteries a better choice. Because lithium-ion batteries offer a higher cycle life, they lend themselves to more varied applications. A typical lithium-ion battery can be cycled anywhere from 4,000 to 9,000 times, compared to just 200 to 1,200 times for a VRLA battery. This not only improves battery service life, but also allows the UPS to be deployed in grid-sharing and peak-shaving applications, which VRLA cannot support. The extended battery life afforded by lithium-ion enables users to align their UPS refresh cycles with the rest of the IT stack, saving time and money spent on labor and replacement batteries.

What are some of the misconceptions about lithium-ion UPSs and what are the realities of the technology?

You’ve likely heard the frightening accounts of overheating lithium-ion batteries in cell phones and laptops, but these types of thermal events are not cause for concern in UPS applications. In fact, several factors make lithium-ion UPSs intrinsically safe, including the integration of a powerful battery management system (BMS) that provides cell protection, cell balancing, state of charge and health alarms. The BMS quickly detects any abnormal conditions and, if necessary, will safeguard the system from damage by disconnecting the affected battery. Furthermore, lithium-ion UPS batteries are protected with more robust packaging than those found in cell phones and laptops.

Although pricing for lithium-Ion batteries is still fairly higher than traditional batteries, the total cost of ownership over time is substantially lower. Customers do not need to worry about the replacement cost of the battery every three to four years and the cost of shipping, installing and returning these legacy batteries. This can be a significant cost in distributed IT with individual UPSs scattered among hundreds of sites. Sending service personnel to all of these sites to only perform one battery swap is a huge cost that can easily be avoided with lithium-Ion batteries.

How can this technology reduce risks for companies?

Organizations gain simplified maintenance through the BMS and extended reliability from the longer lifespan afforded by lithium-ion batteries. Ultimately, lithium-ion UPSs enable busy IT professionals to focus on revenue-producing activities, rather than worrying about the performance of their power protection solution.

Lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries are a relatively new variety of battery being studied and developed by researchers around the world. Because they have very high theoretical energy densities – storing more than five times as much energy in a smaller volume than the most state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries – they are strong contenders for applications both small and large.

But before real-life applications can be realized, some performance issues must be addressed – namely, poor conductivity and inadequate energy efficiency. These glitches stem from the chemical species and reactions within the battery as charge is transferred via lithium atoms between the two battery electrodes and through the electrolyte that separates them. These problems may be remedied by adding conductive metal sulfides, such as copper sulfide (CuS), iron disulfide (FeS2), titanium disulfide (TiS2) and others to the battery’s sulfur electrode. However, unique and distinctive behaviors have been observed for each type of metal sulfide in the Li-S batteries. To understand the fundamental mechanisms of these different behaviors, scientists need to be able to closely study these complex reactions in real time as the battery discharges and charges, which is a challenge.

At the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, a group of researchers conducted a multi-technique X-ray study to learn more about the structural and chemical evolution of a metal sulfide additive – copper sulfide (CuS), in this case – as the lithium ions moved between the battery’s electrodes. Their work is an example of an operando study, an approach that allows researchers to gather structural and chemical information while, at the same time, take measurements of electrochemical activity. The group used a “multi-modal” approach involving a suite of X-ray techniques: X-ray powder diffraction to gather structural information, X-ray fluorescence imaging to visualize the changes in elemental distribution, and X-ray absorption spectroscopy to follow the chemical reactions.

The results, featured in the October 11, 2017, online edition of Scientific Reports, shine new light on the structural and chemical evolution of the system.

Exploring additives for better performance

Among the choices of metal sulfide additives, CuS is favorable for a few reasons, including its high conductivity and energy density. In prior studies, the group found that adding CuS to a sulfur-only electrode enhances the battery’s discharge capacity because sulfur is a poor conductor and CuS is both more conductive and electrochemically active. However, when hybrid sulfur/CuS cathodes (the positive electrode) were used, Cu ions dissolved in the electrolyte and were ultimately deposited on the lithium anode (the negative electrode), destroying the interface layer between the anode and the electrolyte. This caused the cell to fail after just a few charge-discharge cycles.

“This observation represents a design challenge in multi-functional electrodes: while introducing new components with desirable properties, parasitic reactions may occur and hinder the original design intentions,” said Hong Gan, a scientist in Brookhaven’s Sustainable Energy Technologies Department and one of the paper’s corresponding authors.

“This observation represents a design challenge in multi-functional electrodes: while introducing new components with desirable properties, parasitic reactions may occur and hinder the original design intentions,” said Hong Gan, a scientist in Brookhaven’s Sustainable Energy Technologies Department and one of the paper’s corresponding authors.

He continued, “To address the specific problems in the case of a Li-S battery with a CuS additive, as well as to guide the future design of electrodes, we need to better understand the evolution of these systems in every way we can: structurally, chemically, and morphologically.”

Going multi-modal and operando

“We saw the need to develop a multi-modal approach that would not just study one aspect of the system evolution, but provide a more holistic view on many aspects of the system, using multiple complementary synchrotron techniques,” said the paper’s other corresponding author, Karen Chen-Wiegart, an assistant professor in Stony Brook University’s Materials Science and Chemical Engineering Department who also holds a joint appointment at NSLS-II.

To enable this, the group first designed a battery cell that is fully compatible with all three X-ray techniques and could be studied at three different X-ray beamlines at NSLS-II. Their design not only allows measurements to be conducted at both of the battery’s electrodes, but is optically transparent, enabling the researchers to perform in-line optical microscopy and alignment at the beamlines.

“These characteristics are critical, as they allow us to spatially resolve the reactions from different components and at multiple locations within the cell, which is one of our main research aims,” said Chen-Wiegart.

Moreover, as pointed out by team members Ke Sun (Brookhaven’s Sustainable Energy Technologies Department), Chonghang Zhao, and Cheng-Hung Lin (both from Stony Brook University), their versatile and simple design, using economical parts, allows many cells to be constructed for each synchrotron experiment, greatly facilitating their research. Sun, Zhao, and Lin together developed the multi-modal in-situ battery cells. Additionally, the team of scientists designed a multi-cell holder that allows to cycle several batteries simultaneously and measure them successively and continuously.

Such a comprehensive approach takes a team of researchers with expertise from different backgrounds. The scientists from Brookhaven’s Sustainable Energy Technologies Department and Stony Brook University collaborated closely with the scientists at NSLS-II. They worked with scientists Jianming Bai and Eric Dooryhee to use operando X-ray powder diffraction (XPD) to study the structural evolution of the hybrid electrode as it discharged. NSLS-II’s XPD beamline is an effective tool in studying battery reactions, including Li-S batteries, and it was used in this case to capture the timing of the reaction between the lithium and the CuS, relative to its reaction with sulfur. The XPD data also indicate that the reaction products are not crystalline, shown by the lack of diffraction peaks.

To learn more, the group turned to operando X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), performed at the Inner Shell Spectroscopy (ISS) beamline, working with NSLS-II scientists Eli Stavitski and Klaus Attenkofer. The XAS data suggest that, after the battery has fully discharged, the CuS has been converted to a species with ratios of Cu and S somewhere between CuS and Cu2S. To further pinpoint the precise phase composition, the group will perform additional XAS studies in the future.

To visualize the dissolution of CuS and its subsequent re-deposition on the lithium anode, the scientists conducted operando X-ray fluorescence (XRF) microscopy at the Submicron Resolution X-ray Spectroscopy (SRX) beamline with the assistance of scientists Garth Williams and Juergen Thieme. XRF imaging identifies the elements in a sample by measuring the X-ray fluorescence emitted when the sample is excited by a primary X-ray source. In this case, it allowed the group to image the distribution of elements in the battery, as well as how and when that distribution evolved. This information could then be correlated with the chemical and structural evolution data obtained by the XPD and XAS studies.

Putting it all together

When the findings from each X-ray technique are reviewed in total, a picture forms – albeit a complex one – of the evolution of the sulfur-CuS hybrid electrode’s crystalline phase as well as how the CuS dissolves during cell discharge. During the first part of the discharge, the sulfur in the cathode is completely consumed, seemingly converted to soluble lithium polysulfides, such as LiS3, LiS4, and so on, up to LiS8. Next, the polysulfides are then converted to non-crystalline Li2S2, which is then further converted to crystalline Li2S. This lithiation of the sulfur stops towards the end of the full discharge mark. At that point, the lithiation of CuS begins, forming non-crystalline Cu/S species.

The CuS interacts strongly with some of the polysulfide species. Cu ions dissolve into the electrolyte, where they migrate from the cathode to the anode. On the anode surface, various copper species are deposited and, soon after, the cell fails.

The above work provides a clear mechanism about how sulfur and copper sulfide interact with each other inside a Li-S cell during discharge/charge cycling. The research team will apply the multi-modal synchrotron method developed in this work to study the cycling mechanism of other battery systems. The search for multifunctional conductive additives for Li-sulfur batteries will focus on other more stable transition metal sulfides, such as titanium disulfide (TiS2), which show no Ti ion dissolute in electrolyte during cell discharging/charging.

Lithium-ion batteries are expensive, and large battery packs such as those in everything from electric cars to electric motorcycles and e-bikes usually make up the single largest cost of the entire vehicle. So it makes sense that you’d want to ensure your batteries live as long and happy a life as possible. Join Electrek as we take a look at why lithium-ion batteries die, and how you can increase and even double the lifespan of your batteries.

In order to understand how to increase the life of lithium-ion batteries, we first have to understand why they die. The short answer is that basically, during every charge and discharge cycle, very small parasitic reactions occur between the electrolyte and the electrodes inside a lithium-ion battery cell, building up over time and reducing the amount of energy the cell can both store and output.

This is of course a seriously over-simplified explanation, but it’s enough for now, as we just want to know how to avoid this parasitic reaction, or at least slow it down in order to keep the battery alive for as long as possible.

If you want to learn more specifics about the death process of lithium-ion battery cells, I highly recommend watching Professor Jeff Dahn’s lecture on the subject. Jeff Dahn is the leader of Tesla’s battery research partnership with Dalhousie University, and his student protegé now leads Tesla’s battery longevity program. His lecture is over one hour-long, but is well worth it if you’re a battery nerd like me.

What causes these parasitic reactions to kill lithium-ion batteries?

There are basically two main factors that speed up the inevitable death of your battery:

• High temperatures
• Increased time spent at high voltages (i.e. high charge level)

Both of these contribute to faster death of lithium-ion batteries. According to Jeff Dahn, high temperatures aggravate the parasitic reactions that occur in a lithium-ion battery’s electrolyte, while high charge levels result in extra performance for a few cycles, followed by a crash in performance and much faster deterioration of the cell.

Fortunately for us, both of these factors can be controlled to make batteries last as long as possible. The following simple steps can be taken to drastically increase the life of nearly any lithium-ion batteries.

How to make Li-ion batteries last longer
The first thing you should do is to avoid letting your battery get hot. Fortunately, many electric vehicles go part of the way there. Tesla’s vehicles and the Chevy Bolt/Volt all use active cooling to keep the battery from overheating, though the Nissan Leaf relies on passive air cooling to keep the battery cool, making battery heat an even larger factor for those vehicles.

The bigger heat issue that you have more control over is heat during charging. Even for cars with active battery cooling, the battery still heats up considerably during charging, especially when charging at high rates or supercharging. While supercharging is convenient when you need to get back on the road quickly, it is terrible for battery life if performed often. To make your battery last as long as possible, you should try to charge at lower rates, which keeps the battery cooler and happier. A longer charge each night is much better than supercharging over lunch each day.

Next, you should aim to charge to lower levels when possible, especially if the car will be resting for a long period of time. While it may be comforting to see your battery meter read “100%”, your battery will be anything but comfortable.

Jeff Dahn states that charging to a level below 100% can have a large impact by reducing the rate of degradation of the battery.

Most people don’t use their entire electric vehicle battery pack capacity every day, and rarely have the need to charge all the way to 100%. By charging a lithium-ion battery to 80%, the lifetime of the battery can be as much as doubled, according to Grin Technologies. This Canadian company performed such tests while developing an adjustable charger designed for electric bicycles and other light electric vehicle batteries.

It is important to note that the most damage from high charge levels comes from when the battery rests at such high levels for long periods of time. I’ve heard of many people who freak out after learning about the effect of high charge levels, with some swearing off 100% charging forever.

But 100% charging isn’t a big deal in small doses. If you are planning a long trip and will be heading out shortly after you finish charging, a 100% charge will have very little impact on your battery’s lifespan. However, if you will be leaving your battery unused for many days or weeks, a charge level of between 30-60% is much healthier for the batteries over the long-term.

Does this apply to all lithium batteries?
Theoretically yes, though LiFePO4 batteries aren’t quite as affected by high charge levels as the rest of the lithium-ion lineup. But generally speaking, these rules apply to all lithium-ion batteries from your electric car to your cell phone and even your electric tooth brush. Professor Dahn even jokes that you’d be well advised to keep your laptop in the fridge when you’re not using it, if you really want to get extreme about increasing your battery life.

For the most part, these simple methods can greatly increase the lifespan of your battery, and are easy to implement. Avoid supercharging your electric car unless necessary. Park your e-bike in the shade when available. Don’t leave your laptop and phone sitting in the sun or your hot car, and avoid charging your lithium-ion battery powered devices to 100% if possible.

Unfortunately I don’t know of any cell phones or laptop manufacturers that make 80-90% charging easy, likely because they’d rather just sell you a new product in a couple of years. But if you won’t be using the device for a while, make sure it isn’t charged all the way up before your turn it off and stick it in a drawer. Your battery will thank you.

How much is a lithium business really worth? Enthusiasts of the metal used in rechargeable batteries are about to find out.

FMC Corp. is looking to separate its lithium assets and list a portion of the shares in October, before providing the remainder to FMC shareholders within six months, the Philadelphia-based company said Thursday. It’s set to be the first U.S. initial public offering by a major lithium pure-play.

The decision comes as lithium demand is expected to surge along with purchases of electric vehicles. Demand for the lightweight metal will rise five-fold by 2025, potentially exceeding the world’s production capacity, Chief Executive Officer Pierre Brondeau said in February.

Last year, Brondeau said he expects the new lithium company to be valued at about 15 times anticipated 2019 earnings of about $200 million, or about $3 billion. Earnings now are expected to hit that level in 2018, a year early, as prices for the white metal soar, the company said Thursday. FMC extracts lithium from brine in northwestern Argentina.

The spinoff will be the first opportunity for a major lithium producer’s unit to be valued independently of other operations. Large companies such as Albemarle Corp., Soc. Quimica & Minera de Chile SA and FMC are diversified, with an historical focus on other industries such as specialty chemicals or agricultural compounds.

Lithium makes up about 9 percent of FMC’s revenue, with the remainder coming from crop protection chemicals, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That compares with 44 percent at Albemarle and 31 percent at SQM, the data show. Today, FMC trades more closely to its agro-chemical peers, according to Christopher Perrella, a chemicals analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.

“There’s potential for a higher valuation for the lithium piece of the puzzle versus the ag chemical one,” Perrella said.

That’s also the reason why other lithium producers are watching the sale closely. Albemarle Chief Executive Officer Luke Kissam said in March he’s eager to see how the value settles for the FMC spinoff, and that if its price-to-earnings ratio is high enough, it would also look to create a pure-play lithium business, selling off non-lithium units.

Other publicly traded lithium companies tend to have listed in an earlier stage in their process, and in foreign exchanges, such as Orocobre Ltd. and Galaxy Resources Ltd. in Australia and Lithium Americas Corp. in Canada. Another long-awaited listing — China’s Ganfeng, which is looking to raise as much as $1 billion — is expected to take place in Hong Kong.

Efforts to boost supply haven’t gone unnoticed. A report by Morgan Stanley earlier this year warned of a possible oversupply, helping trigger a stock selloff and outflows from the main lithium ETF. Detractors of the report have waved off the concerns, pointing to continuing demand.

The fact that lithium is still the material of choice in electric batteries is a remarkable thing.Designing the latest iterations of electric vehicles (EVs) and indeed solving the world’s dependency on oil has been one of the world’s greatest scientific breakthroughs of the previous decade. Even Toyota Motor Corp., a long-time evangelist of hydrogen fuel cell technology, announced last year that it is fast-tracking EVs using lithium-ion batteries.

But what about disrupting the lithium supply chain from within? Everyone in the industry knows that the lithium supply chain has had three distinct phases since the material started to get extracted from the ground earlier last century.The first phase was a limited lithium supply from mining spodumene pegmatites, a practice that was disrupted in the 1990s when Chilean companies started getting lithium carbonate from evaporating the salt lake brines of the Atacama Desert.

Phase 3 was spurred by the evolution of the li-ion battery in electrical components and mobile phones, creating enough demand to make rock mining feasible again. But what else is out there that could create a fourth phase?There is one untapped resource that stands out in studies published in the handbook of the U.S. Geological Survey. Lithium found in bromine brines extracted from major oil and gas production regions in the U.S.

such as Arkansas and North Dakota. The Smackover oilfield brine in Arkansas, known as the biggest source of lithium contained in these brines, could contain 1 million metric tons of lithium reserves, about a third of the reserves of the massive Atacama Salt Lake in Chile.Arkansas supplies about a half of the world’s supply of bromine from oilfield brines, selling the chemical around the world to make flame retardant material and agricultural chemicals.

The leftover tail brine, which could contain as much as 400 milligrams per liter of lithium, is re-injected underground. Annual brine production averaged 42.6 million cubic meters a year between 2010 and 2016, according to the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission.

To make this puzzle even more interesting, Albemarle Corp., the world’s largest lithium producer, competes head to head with Germany’s Lanxess and Tetra Technologies as one of the world’s largest bromine suppliers. The big question is, why is Albemarle spending large amounts of capital developing lithium reserves in Australia and Chile when it has a massive lithium resource contained in one of its own industrial feedstocks?

Albemarle announced back in 2011 that it had developed a proprietary technology to extract lithium from bromine brines at its Magnolia, Arkansas facility.

The Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based giant has been surprisingly coy about this development ever since.Albemarle is not alone anymore in developing this new horizon lithium resource. Standard Lithium Ltd., a company formed by former executives of Pure Energy Minerals, have entered into an agreement with Tetra Technologies to create a pilot plant to experiment with the company’s tail brine feedstock in Arkansas.

Pure Energy, with a project near the Clayton Valley lithium mine in Nevada, developed a proprietary new processing technology under the leadership of Standard Lithium CEO Robert Mintak, leading to a deal with Tesla Motors Corp.Discovering a way of extracting lithium from bromine brine would be a massive win for any company that has the scientific expertise to accomplish this feat. Any such company would avoid all the huge capex and hassle in permitting, and developing a new greenfield site, be it from a salt lake operation or hard rock mine.

One of the world’s biggest lithium refineries is set to be established south of Perth, which the state government says puts WA at the centre of the booming global industry.

The 50-50 joint venture between Australia’s Kidman Resources and Chilean company Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM) will see a multi-million dollar refinery built in Kwinana to service a proposed lithium mine in the northern Goldfields.

The refinery will produce about 40,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide each year.

“Other states are talking but we’re the only ones that are actually involved in this industry,” Minister for Mines and Petroleum Bill Johnston said.

“We have every element that you need to make a battery here in Western Australia.”

Western Australia is already the home of the world’s largest lithium mine in Greenbushes in WA’s south-west, and a number of other mines and processing plants have been flagged for the state.

China’s Tianqi Lithium is in the process of setting up a $400 million dollar refinery, which will also be in Kwinana.

Putting WA on the map

The state government has also committed $5.5 million towards setting up a lithium and new energy research centre, which would need federal funding to progress.

Premier Mark McGowan said WA is well-placed to capitalise on a high-demand global market, which has been driven by the its use in making new-generation batteries and electric cars.

“My government wants to make sure that we process as much of that lithium [as possible], and that Western Australians get those jobs and opportunities.”

Opportunities for regional WA

In July last year three areas were short-listed as potential locations for the new refinery — Kwinana, Kemerton Industrial Park, near Bunbury, and the Munfari Industrial Estate, near Kalgoorlie-Boulder.

Several regional MPs had been lobbying for the refinery to be based in the south-west, including the Labor member for Collie-Preston, Mick Murray, who told the ABC last year a major industry was needed to kick-start the region’s economy.

South West Nationals MP Colin Holt had also been calling for the refinery to be set up outside the metropolitan area, and said today’s announcement that the refinery would be in Kwinana was disappointing.

“As a government you’ve got to work harder with the proponents to say, ‘well we think it’s better located in the South West to bring about economic development in the regions’,” he said.

Although Mr Johnston said while it was not the government’s decision to base the refinery in Kwinana, he supports the decision.

“Governments can’t tell the private sector what to do, they have to make their own decisions, ” he said.

He said a Kwinana-based refinery will create jobs in regional WA.

“Every lithium refinery is going to need a whole range of lithium mines,” he said.

“There are also the transport jobs to bring the product from the mine to the refinery.”

He said the “battery revolution” also offers many opportunities for private sector investment in regional WA.

“They’re looking at Ravensthorpe, they’re looking at Kemerton outside Bunbury, and they’re looking in Port Hedland,” he said.

US company Albemarle is considering setting up a lithium plant in Kemerton, one of the sites that was being considered for the new Kwinana proposal.