Lithium News

It’s Swedish, it’s affordable, it’s electric and it’s not a Volvo. Uniti is a relatively new startup in Sweden that is attempting to redefine mobility and electric cars as we know it. Built by a small team in Sweden, the Uniti One is an all-electric city car which the company plans to bring to India in 2020.

The One features a simple, aero-friendly design with smooth surfacing and fully covered wheels. To give you an idea of size, the One is about as big as a Mahindra e2o.

(c) Uniti One

Employing a 22kW lithium-ion battery, the Uniti One has a claimed range of 200 kilometres on a single charge. While there are no performance figures from Uniti, there are a few notable stats: using Uniti’s fast charger, the One can be charged from 0 to 90 percent in just 20 minutes, and a full charge will take 40 minutes. Using a standard wall charger will take about 3 hours to juice the One up fully.

The new Uniti One showcased at Auto Expo 2018 will be offered with a 24kWh battery pack. The battery pack has been installed and is spread across the floor of the car in order to maintain that low center of gravity. The brand employs the Siemens sourced Gallio motor that is mounted on the rear axle that is also present on the Volvo XC90 plugin.

(c) BCCL

The windshield becomes a big HUD for extra information, without taking your eyes off the road. In most places, buttons have been replaced by intuitive swipes.

Interestingly, Uniti already has a price for the One: it will go on sale in 2020 at a price of Rs. 7.14 lakh (ex-showroom), and it could go further down once the Governments FAME subsidy is accounted for.

In fact, Porsche strongly hinted during the showcar’s reveal earlier this week in Geneva that a road-going counterpart is on the agenda. Now, the company has released a collection of four videos providing us with a closer look at what will essentially become a more versatile version of Mission E sedan due to be launched at some point in 2019.

Unlike those jacked-up wagons powered by combustion engines, the Cross Turismo will be entirely electric, and since Porsche has made the promise the sedan will largely carry over the concept’s technical specifications, it should be the same story with its outdoorsy cousin. The two will share the same 800-volt architecture and an electric powertrain with a combined output of more than 600 horsepower (440 kilowatts).

In the case of the Cross Turismo, the zero-emissions system will have enough electric muscle for a sprint to 62 mph (100 kph) in less than 3.5 seconds and a run to 124 mph (200 kph) from a standstill in under 12 seconds. Thanks to fast-charging capabilities, the battery pack will provide enough juice for approximately 250 miles (400 kilometers) after roughly 15 minutes of charge. It’s important to mention that range is according to the soon-to-be-obsolete New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) and we all know that’s not exactly accurate. With the lithium-ion battery fully charged, Porsche is promising a range of more than 310 miles (500 km), also based on NEDC.

In regards to styling, we’re not expecting any major changes on the outside as the Mission E Cross Turismo doesn’t look all that concept-y. Perhaps bigger modifications will occur inside the cabin, but even that is likely similar to what the road-going car will have.

Chinese battery-grade lithium carbonate prices have risen since the lunar new year with producers making higher offers because of the positive outlook for the new energy vehicles market.

Chinese lithium producers pushed prices higher this week on expectations of rising demand from the new energy vehicles (NEVs) sector, and some lithium-ion battery cathode material producers have started to replenish stockpiles on an as-needed basis after the lunar new year holiday.

The spot price for battery-grade lithium carbonate (min 99.5% Li2CO3) increased to 150,000-160,000 yuan ($23,676-25,254) per tonne* on Thursday March 8 from 145,000-155,000 yuan per tonne a week earlier, according to the latest Industrial Minerals’ market assessment.

“The Chinese domestic battery-grade lithium carbonate spot market has gone up, with suppliers expecting more sales post-holiday. I think prices will stay at this higher level for a while. We plan to increase our offer price to 165,000 yuan per tonne later,” a lithium producer told Industrial Minerals.

Meanwhile, prices of technical and industrial grade lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide monohydrate have held steady this week on thin buying activity. The spot price for lithium carbonate (min 99% Li2CO3), technical and industrial grades, ex-works China, was stable at 145,000-150,000 yuan per tonne on March 8.

The price of technical and industrial grades of lithium hydroxide monohydrate (min 56.5% LiOH.H2O) remained at 140,000-145,000 yuan per tonne, while the price of lithium hydroxide monohydrate battery-grade material* was unchanged at 148,000-153,000 yuan per tonne on March 8.

Seaborne markets

The spot prices for seaborne China, Japan and South Korea lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) and hydroxide monohydrate (LiOH.H2O) stayed flat, with overseas buyers showing no interest in restocking.

The spot price for lithium carbonate (min 99% Li2CO3), technical and industrial grade, cif China, Japan and South Korea, remained at $17.50-19.50 per kg, according to Industrial Minerals’ market assessment on March 8. The spot price for lithium carbonate (min 99.5% Li2CO3) battery grade* cif China, Japan and South Korea, was similarly stable at $19.00-21.00 per kg.

The seaborne lithium hydroxide monohydrate (LiOH.H2O) market remained quiet, with buyers still negotiating prices with suppliers. The prices for technical and industrial grades of lithium hydroxide monohydrate (min 56.5% LiOH.H2O) were unchanged at $19-21 per kg while the price for the battery grade* was $19-22 per kg, both on a cif China, Japan and South Korea basis on March 8.

A company looking to recycle waste rock into lithium chemicals for long-life batteries has earmarked a Coolgardie deposit mined about 40 years ago as potential feed stock for a pilot plant.

Lithium Australia plans to develop a pilot plant in WA by 2020 to produce lithium chemicals from lepidolite mica, a waste rock common to many deposits in the Goldfields and Pilbara which cannot be processed conventionally.

Its competitor Lepidico, the subject of a failed takeover bid from Lithium Australia, recently signed a deal to process mica at Galaxy’s Mt Cattlin lithium mine near Ravensthorpe.

Lithium Australia managing director Adrian Griffin said the company was planning the permitting process on Lepidolite Hill, a joint venture with gold explorer Focus Minerals 15km south of Coolgardie, in a bid to provide up to 12 months of feedstock for the pilot plant.

It is looking to beneficiate lepidolite ore in waste dumps which were mined in the 1970s for petalite, a lower-grade style lithium ore used in ceramics long before the recent revolution sparked by soaring demand from the battery market.

“I think if you look at that deposit as an example it’s quite interesting in that it was mined for lithium in the 1970s,” Mr Griffin said. “It was mined for a mineral called petalite, but the lepidolite, which is the lithium mica that was mined concurrently, was all thrown in the dumps because there was no way at the time they could process that.

“Mt Cattlin, which is Galaxy, has a lot of lithium mica in it, some of the deposits in the Pilbara have a lot of lithium mica in them, and of course we’re looking at our own deposits at Ravensthorpe and Lake Johnston which have a lot of lithium mica.

“It’s fair to say that we are doing a lot of work on Lepidolite Hill, we are applying for the relevant permitting to recover that material and we are evaluating other resources in the area.”

Sugar cubes are a key component of a new substrate that can prevent dendrites from degrading and ultimately destroying lithium metal batteries.

Lithium, a soft metal, has the ability to store far more energy than current electrodes used in lithium-ion batteries. It could allow electric cars to run longer on a single charge and facilitate backup energy supplies for solar power grids. But pure lithium is highly reactive with organic battery components, and researchers are looking for ways to make lithium batteries as long-lasting and safe as lithium-ion batteries.

Stress and ‘whiskers’

Led by Hanqing Jiang, a professor at the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport, and Energy at Arizona State University, the research team reports that stress within a lithium anode can prompt the formation of dendrites—just like the “whiskers” often seen in stressed tin and zinc coatings—and ultimately cause batteries to fail. Dendrites growing from an anode consume both lithium and the electrolyte and can short-circuit the battery.

“There are two points worth noting in this paper,” says Ming Tang, materials scientist at Rice University and coauthor of the paper describing the work in Nature Energy. “The first is that we proposed a fundamental mechanism for lithium dendrite growth, and the second, based on that understanding, is a technology to help suppress it.”

“If there’s stress, the atoms are very happy to move. That’s why we can see dendrites form within hours, even minutes.”

Tang, former Rice postdoctoral researcher Liang Hong, and Rice graduate student Fan Wang modeled the compressive stress generated during the plating of soft metals on flat surfaces to show how lithium dendrites grow.

“Whiskers or needle-like protrusions forming on metal surfaces under stress are a long-known phenomenon in metallurgy,” Tang says. “People have noticed that dendrites in lithium are similar to the whiskers in tin and zinc, but they haven’t known that compressive stress exists in lithium metal during battery cycling. The experiments by Dr. Jiang’s group provided definitive confirmation of the association between compressive stress and dendrite formation.”

Tin whiskers are like straight wires, but lithium dendrite filaments take a more meandering path. Tang says the research suggests the mechanism for the two is similar.

“Compared with tin, lithium has an even lower melting point at 180 degrees Celsius (356 degrees Fahrenheit),” he says. “This means lithium atoms are even more mobile at room temperature. If there’s stress, the atoms are very happy to move. That’s why we can see dendrites form within hours, even minutes.”

The team’s theory explains the experimental observations made by Jiang’s lab, which showed that plating lithium metal onto a flat substrate offered it nowhere to go but out in the form of dendrites.

To solve this problem, the team looked for a way to direct stress inward by electroplating lithium around a soft, porous substrate that would allow for breathing room and quench dendrite formation.

Sweet science

This is where the sugar comes in. To make test batteries, the Arizona State lab infused sugar cubes with liquid silicone and then dissolved the sugar, which left behind a three-dimensional porous structure of soft silicone.

“It’s really cool,” Tang says. “The sugar becomes a sacrificial template. When it’s removed, it leaves a substrate with a very large internal surface, like a sponge that can collapse and deform.”

The Arizona State lab built lithium metal batteries with a thin copper film within the soft substrate to conduct electrons. The batteries had a coulombic efficiency—the ability to maintain energy density—of nearly 98 percent over 200 cycles and easily outperformed test cells with flat copper substrates.

The substrate showed the ability to wrinkle under stress and make room for the invading lithium. “There were remarkable reductions in dendrite growth,” Jiang says.

In ongoing research, the batteries will be tweaked and tested to see how they hold up over the long term, Tang says.

“For practical purposes, you want batteries that last for several thousand cycles so they will last for years,” he says. “That needs to be looked at.”

Additional coauthors of the paper are from Arizona State and Hunan University in China.

The Department of Energy Office of Science supported the research. Rice University, through the Big-Data Private-Cloud Research Cyberinfrastructure, funded by the National Science Foundation, provided computing support.