In recent weeks, Solid Power, one of the more lavishly funded solid-state companies, has been reported to have fired up a pilot line in Colorado that it's hoping will answer the question of how to build millions of good-enough batteries under painstakingly lab conditions fast.
As specified in a WIRED report, startups working on solid-state batteries have made steady development towards such goals in recent months.
Once you’ve built a good-enough battery under painstaking lab conditions, how do you build millions of them quickly? https://t.co/h2doYadKHy
— WIRED (@WIRED) June 6, 2022
Small battery cells that once faltered after being charged are growing into bigger ones that are going much larger.
More so, there is still a way to go until these cells become road-ready, although progress has set up the next challenge, as earlier mentioned.
The Goal to Deliver Cells to Car Makers
These firms will need to have a massive mindset change, shifting from being R&D to manufacturing companies, and "it's not going to be simple." according to Venkat Srinivasan, director of the Argonne Collaborative Centre for Energy Storage Science.
At full capacity, it will produce 300 cells each week, or around 15,000 each year. That is a trickle compared with the millions of cells generated every year by gigafactories, and getting there will still take months of fine-tuning tools and processes.
However, CEO Dough Campbell said, the goal is to begin delivering cells to car makers such as BMW and Ford for automotive testing by the end of this year.
Once the car manufacturers are happy with how the batteries are doing on the road, the company plans to pass the baton to one of its giga-factory-owning battery partners, specifically SK Innovation, a Korean battery behemoth.
Campbell explained that it needs to be somewhat simple. Solid Power has developed what the company CEO describes as a "uniquely manufacturable flavor" of solid-state design that allows manufacturers of batteries to reuse existing processes and equipment designed for lithium-ion batteries, a similar Ghanamma News report specified.
Challenge in Scaling Up Manufacturing of Batteries
Describing the Colorado facility, he said in an ideal world; this is the last cell production line run by Solid Power.
In principle, it makes sense. A battery is a battery. Similar to their liquid-filled cousins, solid-state batteries need an anode, a cathode, and some way for ions to migrate between the two. This is where the electrolyte enters.
It is not easy to make something porous to ions but solid enough not to break or crack. Researchers have spent years searching for the right materials, eventually settling on various notions, including plasticky polymers and ceramics.
Both firms and some competitors likely remain years away from putting their batteries in vehicles for sale. As the battery size increases, they are gauged in layers, and small imperfections compound, which poses a specific problem for scaling up.
What's a Solid-State Battery?
A study published in the Encyclopedia of Electrochemical Power Sources describes solid-state batteries as an "emerging option for next-generation traction batteries" that promise low cost, high performance, and high safety.
Essentially, liquid electrolytes with high ionic conductivity and practically no electronic conductivity perform effectively over a wide range of temperatures, from a few tens of degrees below °C to approximately 100°C.
They pose disadvantages, though, due to their high flammability, highly resistive SEI at the electrodes that lead to capacity loss, HF formation at thermal runaway, and risk of leakage, among other drawbacks.
Solid electrolyte lithium-ion cells don't exhibit such drawbacks and allow higher operating temperatures because of better thermal ability.
Because of higher electrochemical stability, high potential cathode and even metallic Li may be used as anode resulting in higher specific energy. However, lithium melts when the temperature is ∼180°C.
A report about the solid-state batteries is shown on Autoline Network's YouTube video below:
Check out more news and information on Batteries in Science Times.
