Lithium News

It’s not always easy being green, as Kermit the Frog was fond of saying. Sales of environmentally friendly vehicles have lagged in an SUV-focused market. But at least three automakers are hoping they can gain a little momentum thanks to the green car trophies they’re taking home this week.

Kia nabbed honors as the Green SUV of the Year during a ceremony at the Washington, D.C. Auto Show with its new Niro crossover vehicle. Two other awards were presented by Green Car Journal, the sponsor of the awards, including Green Luxury Car of the Year, which went to the Karma Revero, and Connected Green Car of the Year, which was presented to the Cadillac CT6 Plug-in Hybrid.

The Kia Niro – which got a big send-up during last year’s Super Bowl thanks to a humorous Melissa McCarthy commercial – is one of a small but growing number of vehicles offered with a selection of different, low and no-emissions powertrains. The crossover initially debuted in hybrid and plug-in hybrid form and a prototype version of an all-electric Niro was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early this month. A production version is expected late in 2018.

“We’re thrilled to have received this special distinction from Green Car Journal,” said Orth Hedrick, Vice President of Strategy and Planning at Kia Motors America. “The Niro represents years of hard work by Kia to provide eco-conscious car buyers a vehicle that is fun, versatile, economical, and a pleasure to look at and drive.

While pricing hasn’t been revealed for the pure battery-electric model, the Niro hybrid starts at $23,340, with the plug-in at $27,900. That underscores the way manufacturers are trying to push down the price of battery-based technology to enhance the appeal of vehicles like the Niro. That said, a senior executive with parent Hyundai-Kia Motors also acknowledged during a CES presentation that almost all automakers now lose money on their electrified models.

That isn’t expected to change until at least the coming decade, when the price of lithium-ion batteries falls by as much as half, to anywhere from $70 to $100 per kilowatt-hour, according to the Boston Consulting Group. The consultancy recently estimated manufacturers are today spending as much as $200 per kWh for lithium technology.

Packing batteries into a mainstream vehicle is especially challenging, as there’s little profit margin to begin with. That may help explain why luxury brands seem to be more aggressive in going electric. Within just the last few months, a number of high-line brands have announced aggressive electrification programs, Infiniti this month saying that will include virtually every vehicle it builds by the end of this decade.

So, the choice for Green Luxury Car of the Year took some observers by surprise – the Karma Revero topping a list of finalists that also included the BMW 530e, Cadillac CT6 Plug-In, Lexus LS 500H and Porsche Panamera 4 E-Hybrid.

“We designed the Revero to strike an elegant balance between design and advanced electric technology,” said Jim Taylor, Karma Automotive’s Chief Revenue Officer. “This award confirms we are on the right path.”

The name, Karma Revero might confuse some folks. The sleek electric sports coupe originally debuted as the Fisker Karma, but that company went broke in 2011 and its assets were sold off to a Chinese automaker that brought the bankrupt firm back as Karma, renaming the car itself Revero. It recently went through a series of modest updates to its exterior and interior design and powertrain.

Cadillac didn’t drive off empty-handed. It’s flagship CT6 Plug-in sedan took the third enviro-trophy at the Washington Auto Show, this one for Connected Green Car of the Year. The award reflects the vehicle’s extensive range of onboard electronics, including the new Super Cruise system which allows limited hands-free driving.

“Technology and innovation have always been at the core of Cadillac,” said Cadillac CT6 Launch and Lifecycle Manager Eric Angeloro, adding that the new model, “Changes the expectations of what a hybrid can be.”

Caddy is actually one of more than a half-dozen manufacturers to offer some form of semi-autonomous technology for the 2018 model-year.

The announcement of the Green Car awards in Washington completes the cycle that began at the 2017 Los Angeles Auto Show last November. During a ceremony there, the new Honda Clarity was named Green Car of the Year. Like the Niro, it will be offered in three different versions, including a plug-in hybrid, an all-electric model and as a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle.

Elon Musk is notorious for blowing deadlines. But he eventually gets it right.

“Tesla employees say to expect more Model 3 delays,” read a headline from CNBC yesterday. CNBC’s Lora Kolodny reported that despite Tesla’s ambitions to run a highly automated manufacturing process, Tesla has been being forced to perform some battery-assembly steps in its Nevada Gigafactory by hand, borrowing scores of employees from its battery partner, Panasonic, to do it.

It sounds like a big headache for the Palo Alto carmaker until you notice one key detail: the article is talking about the state of Tesla’s manufacturing operation “as recently as mid-December.”

In December, Tesla and Panasonic workers were manually assembling bandoliers, rows of lithium-ion cells glued on either side of a cooling tube. It’s a tricky task to complete by hand, so the manual assembly led to a lot of errors and waste.

But more recently, Kolodny acknowledges, Tesla has begun to ramp up production.

“Once the machines in the factory were able to crank out bandoliers as fast or faster than the manual laborers, Tesla began sending Panasonic workers back to their employer,” Kolodny reports, citing anonymous sources at the factory. “Today, Tesla is winding down manual assembly as much as possible at the Gigafactory.”

In other words, this seems to be a story of Tesla fixing a production bottleneck and ramping up production—even though the headline gives the opposite impression.

To be fair, one engineer told CNBC that a lack of spare capacity leads to frequent shutdowns: “There’s no redundancy, so when one thing goes wrong, everything shuts down.” But automated production with frequent shutdowns is better than manual assembly. And this is presumably a problem Tesla can fix in the coming months.

It’s important to remember the broader context here. Tesla is notorious for setting ambitious deadlines for itself and then failing to hit them.

For example, in 2009, Tesla was planning to ship the Model S in 2011, but the start of production wound up slipping to mid-2012. Tesla then set a goal to produce 5,000 vehicles during that first calendar year, but only managed to produce 3,100.

But Tesla ultimately did figure out how to produce the Model S in significant volume, and the car became Tesla’s biggest success story.

Production of the Model 3 has gotten off to an even slower start than the Model S. The company only managed to produce about 1,800 Model 3s in the third and fourth quarters of 2017. But Tesla has significant financial resources. It can afford a few months’ delay if it’s ultimately able to perfect its production process.

And the CNBC report suggests that Tesla has made significant progress in that direction over the last month. Production processes that had been performed manually in December are becoming increasingly automated.

Tesla still has a long way to go to manufacture the 400,000 Model 3’s that customers have already ordered—not to mention making them cheaply enough to turn a profit. But Elon Musk has no shortage of persistence and determination. We’re not going to count him out yet.

 

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).