Lithium News

You don’t have to be Elon Musk to think outside the box. At age 12, Adam Lansing decided to convert a gasoline car to electric power after watching his older brother ask their parents for gas money. Six years later, Lansing cruises around in his own homemade electric car, but getting to this point took a lot of work.

The project got started when the father of one of Lansing’s friends overhead him talking about an electric-car conversion, and offered up an engineless 1980 Toyota Celica that was sitting outside his garage with a tree branch growing through the rear bumper. Not the most glamorous of starts, then.

It took Lansing two years to acquire all of the parts he needed for the electric conversion, and two more years to get the car running. He said he rebuilt the Celica 52 times, working up to 20 hours a day on the car to fix problems.

“Part way around 35 to 40ish was when it got the most frustrating,” Lansing said in a Toyota press release. “But the support from my family, friends, and girlfriend kept me going. You have to keep in mind the end goal.”

Now 18 and recently graduated from Plano East High School in Texas, Lansing has a fully functional electric vehicle with a 130-mile range. He didn’t have to do everything alone, acquiring sponsorships from Core IV and Plasma Boy Racing. They supplied the 30-kilowatt-hour lithium iron phosphate battery pack that currently powers the Celica. It’s mounted in the trunk.

Plasma Boy Racing founder John Wayland was one of the original inspirations for the project. While researching electric cars, Lansing found YouTube videos of the “White Zombie,” a 1972 Datsun 1200 Wayland converted to electric power for drag racing. The little Datsun showed Lansing that electric cars can be fast as well as frugal.

Lansing has started his own company, Hawkeye Innovations LLC, and hopes to make a living doing to gasoline-to-electric conversions. That’s becoming a burgeoning business, with companies like Genovation and Kreisel Electricconverting familiar sports cars into high-performance electric cars. After all, who said new electric cars can only come from Detroit or Silicon Valley?

This breakthrough was led by Professor Soojin Park in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering in collaboration with Professor Kwanyong Seo and Professor So Youn Kim in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST.

The increasing interest and demand of flexible electronics has fueled the search for highly stretchable electrodes with high mechanical durability and high electrical conductivity during deformation. Although many methods have been proposed for these electrodes, none of them has managed to achieve high stretchability for the electrodes and a scalable manufacturing process.

Professor Park solved such issues using a conductive polymer composite, composed of Jabuticaba-like hybrid carbon fillers containing carbon nanotubes and carbon black in a simple solution process. The shape of this structure resembled that of a Jabuticaba tree, the Brazilian grapetree.

The research team observed that the HCP composite is found to retain its electrical conductivity under high strain rates. This makes it suitable for use in highly stretchable aqueous Li-ion batteries.

“Our findings are expected to expand the number of stretchable nanocomposites with electrochemical and mechanical properties available for use in a wide variety of applications,” says Professor Seo, who was in charge of the fabrication of stretchable current collectors.

A detailed analysis of the percolation behaviors of the conductive filler within the composite was done using an in situ SAXS measurement under stretching, which revealed that the different types of carbon in the filler led to a formation of highly interconnected cosupporting networks. Professor So Youn Kim led the in situ SAXS experiments. SAXS is a highly useful technique for measuring the behavior of nanofillers in polymer matrices. Besides, the research team has, for the first time, developed stretchable ARLB as a stretchable power source, using the HCP composite as a stretchable current collector and they have delivered stable power to a LED even under 100% strain.

“This study is expected to facilitate the design of stretchable nanocomposites with optimized electrochemical and mechanical properties for use in energy storage devices and stretchable electronics,” says Professor Kim.

 

Electrovaya Inc. says its Litarion subsidiary in Germany has begun insolvency proceedings as a result of a cash shortage that arose after its automotive customers took longer than expected to place large battery orders.

The Mississauga, Ont.-based company says it doesn’t expect Litarion’s insolvency will affect the parent company’s ability to fulfil current and future customer orders for its lithium ion battery systems.

Among Electrovaya’s customers is Walmart Canada, which placed a $4.3 million order last year for drop-in lithium ion battery systems to power forklifts at a distribution centre.

Prior to the Walmart Canada order in September, the cleantech firm was awarded $3.8 million under a federal program to fund development of lithium ion ceramic batteries for commercial vehicles.

For the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, Electrovaya reported $11.3 million of revenue—down from $25.1 million in fiscal 2016—and a loss of $27.2 million, more than double its year-earlier loss.

Electrovaya says its subsidiary voluntarily began insolvency proceedings after Litarion’s unsuccessful negotiations with its landlord, which previously warned that its lease would be terminated Jan. 31 unless conditions were met.

Nanoscale reinforcement with graphene girders boosts performance of silicon anodes, Warwick team discovers

When you want to make a structure stronger, put a girder across it. It’s a simple principle that every civil engineer knows well. But a team at Warwick Manufacturing Group has found that it applies just as well on very small scales as in megastructures. Melanie Loveridge and colleagues are studying methods for improving lithium-ion batteries, and have found that minute girders could provide an answer to a problem that has been plaguing the field.

Ever since their first introduction in the early 1990s, the anode of lithium batteries has been made of graphite. It has long been apparent that silicon would be a better material, as it can hold ten times more charge per gramme than carbon. But the mechanics of lithium ion batteries, where lithium ions are absorbed into the anode, create problems.

When silicon is lithiated, it expands. But it is an inelastic material, and repeated expansion and contraction — as happens during charge-discharge cycles — can lead to cracking and crumbling, which makes the capacity of the battery fade over time. Graphene has been tried as a reinforcing material for nanostructured silicon, but this has led to other problems.

Loveridge’s team is looking at a material known as FLG (few-layer graphene). As the name implies, this is composed of a few connected layers of single-atom-thick graphene sheets, which can be manipulated together.

In a paper in Nature Scientific Reports, the WMG team describes how FLG can improve the performance of anodes containing micron-sized particles of silicon. The team started with a mixture of 60 per cent micro-silicon, 16 per cent FLG, 14 per cent sodium/polyacrylic acid and 10 per cent carbon additives, and put these anodes through 100 charge-discharge cycles.

“The flakes of FLG were mixed throughout the anode and acted like a set of strong, but relatively elastic, girders. These flakes of FLG increased the resilience and tensile properties of the material greatly reducing the damage caused by the physical expansion of the silicon during lithiation. The graphene enhances the long range electrical conductivity of the anode and maintains a low resistance in a structurally stable composite,” Loveridge said.

Moreover, she added, the graphene girders keep the silicon particles apart. In their absence, the particles tend to ‘weld’ together, restricting lithium diffusion through the anode and reducing the surface area available for lithiation.

“The presence of FLG in the mixture tested by the WMG University of Warwick led researchers to hypothesise that this phenomenon is highly effective in mitigating electrochemical silicon fusion,” Loveridge stated.

The team is now working on scaling up their graphene girders discovery to produce pouch cells based on their reinforced anodes, as part of a two-year graphene flagship project along with Varta Micro-innovations, Cambridge University, CIC, Lithops and IIT (Italian Institute of Technology).

 

The two former Tesla executives that broke out on their own to build a battery gigafactory in Europe have just secured backing from Volkswagen through their Scania division.

The two companies will develop and commercialize battery cell technology for heavy commercial vehicles at their facilities.

Henrik Henriksson, Scania’s President and CEO, commented on the announcement:

“We aim to make it easy for customers to select sustainable transport solutions. Electrification will play a key part in the shift to a fossil free transport system. However, the current battery cell technology must be developed to fulfil the business requirements of heavy bus and truck customers. With Northvolt as a partner, we believe that we can make major strides forward.”

Last year, VW announced that it plans to invest $1.7 billion to bring electric trucks and buses to market, including through Scania.

Now, the two companies say that they will “establish an expert team and work together at Northvolt’s research facility, Northvolt Labs, in Västerås, Sweden, to develop and commercialize production of battery cells optimized to power commercial vehicles.”

They have already entered into an off-take purchase agreement for battery cells.

As we previously reported, Northvolt plans to build a demonstration-line with ABB to be ready by 2019. The factory is expected to start production in 2020, at which point they target a capacity of 8 GWh per year and they aim for 32 GWh of capacity once the entire factory will be completed in 2023.

It would make it the biggest li-ion battery factory in Europe and comparable in size to the first phase of Tesla’s Gigafactory 1 in Nevada, a project that Peter Carlsson, Founder and CEO of Northvolt, and Paolo Cerruti, COO of Nortvolt, both worked on.

Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed an energy-efficient recycling process that restores used cathodes from spent lithium ion batteries and makes them work just as good as new. The process involves harvesting the degraded cathode particles from a used battery and then boiling and heat treating them. Researchers built new batteries using the regenerated cathodes. Charge storage capacity, charging time and battery lifetime were all restored to their original levels.

This work presents a solution to an environmental concern regarding lithium ion batteries: what to do with them when they wear out. Less than five percent of used lithium ion batteries are recycled today.

“Think about the millions of tons of lithium ion battery waste in the future, especially with the rise of electric vehicles, and the depletion of precious resources like lithium and cobalt–mining more of these resources will contaminate our water and soil. If we can sustainably harvest and reuse materials from old batteries, we can potentially prevent such significant environmental damage and waste,” said Zheng Chen, a professor of nanoengineering at UC San Diego.

Chen, who is affiliated with the Sustainable Power and Energy Center at UC San Diego, says this work could also address economic issues related to battery waste. “The price of lithium, cobalt and nickel has increased significantly. Recovering these expensive materials could lower battery costs,” he said.

The new recycling method, published recently in Green Chemistry, can be used to recover and restore a lithium ion battery cathode material called lithium cobalt oxide, which is widely used in consumer electronic devices including smartphones and laptops. The method also works on NMC, a popular lithium cathode containing nickel, manganese and cobalt, which is used in most electric vehicles.

The method involves first collecting cathode particles from spent lithium ion batteries. Researchers then pressurize the cathode particles in a hot, alkaline, solution containing lithium salt–this solution can be recycled and reused to process more batches. Afterwards, the particles go through a short annealing process in which they are heated to 800 C and then cooled very slowly.

Researchers made new cathodes from the regenerated particles and then tested them in batteries built in the lab. The new cathodes showed the same energy storage capacity, charging time and lifetime as the originals.

An interesting thing about this process, Chen noted, is that it’s essentially the same one that’s used to make the original cathode particles. “We can simply restore the degraded material by putting it through the same processing steps,” he said.

As a lithium ion battery wears out, the cathode material loses some of its lithium atoms. The cathode’s atomic structure also changes such that it’s less capable of moving ions in and out. The recycling process that Chen’s group developed restores both the cathode’s lithium concentration and atomic structure back to their original states.

Overall, the recycling process uses 5.9 megajoules of energy, equivalent to the energy in about three quarters of a cup of gasoline, to restore one kilogram of cathode material. Several other lithium ion battery cathode recycling processes that are being developed use at least twice that energy.

The goal is to optimize this process for industrial scales. Chen’s team is planning to work with battery companies in Asia. A particular area of improvement is the cathode harvesting step, Chen said. Right now, the particles have to be manually picked out from the rest of the battery. Researchers are working on simplifying this step so that the entire process is industrially viable.

Chen’s team is refining this process so that it can be used to recycle any type of lithium ion battery cathode material, in addition to lithium cobalt oxide and lithium NMC. “The goal is to make this a general recycling process for all cathodes,” Chen said. The team is also working on a process to recycle used anodes.