Hello and welcome to Intercalation Station - we’re Andrew & Nick, two energetic individuals in the battery space. We hope this newsletter will be your stop for the latest battery innovations in research and industry, intercalated monthly into your inbox. We’d love it if you share & subscribe here!
🔬 RESEARCH NEWS
Keeping an ‘Ion’ Battery Chemistries
Chemical Reviews has published a massive volume of 14 reviews on beyond Li-ion chemistries covering Ca-ion, K-ion, organic aqueous/nonaqueous, Li-air, electrolytes, solid-state, anode SEIs, atomistic computation, and recycling.
We picked out some advice from Nobel laureate Stanley Whittingham’s editorial perspective for those working in this field:
Emphasize the need for a cleaner environment, for both health and climate change mitigation. We have responsibilities to our children and grandchildren - We need to consider sustainability, recycling, and safety.
Stop the hype. It helps no-one by overpromising and giving unwarranted expectations.
Emphasize the science rather than this will make the next greatest battery. We need a better understanding of reactions mechanisms, thermodynamics, and kinetics. Focused fundamental science is important.
Give enough data to allow direct comparison (e.g., loading in mg/cm2, the rate used in mA/cm2).
A Soft Approach to Dendrite Suppression
A new paper on polymer electrolytes with nanosized ceramic particles by Chengyin Fu, Victor Venturi, Jinsoo Kim, & coworkers at Berkeley Lab & Carnegie Mellon has reported the ability to suppress dendrites at an early nucleation stage.
The hybrid electrolyte accomplishes this by exploiting the volume change associated with the lithium plating reaction, instead of the high shear-moduli typically employed in hard ceramic electrolytes.
Brett Helms also commented in a news release that the electrolyte can be laminated directly onto lithium metal anodes which is huge for manufacturability. The high power capability may also mean it is suitable for eVTOL and other electric aircraft.
A patent based on this design principle was also published in 2019 by Brett Helms and Peter Frischmann from Berkeley Lab and Sepion Technologies.
The Making of @Electrochemicat
Many of our readers may be familiar with @electrochemicat, the trusted twitter bot sharing the latest and greatest in battery and energy storage work since October 2019:
We got in touch with the twitter bot’s parents Edwin Khoo (Institute for Infcomm Research, A*STAR Singapore) and Kaicheng Liang (Bioinformatics Institute, A*STAR Singapore), and they shared their story behind electrochemicat:
Reflecting the increasing importance of batteries in portable electronics, electric vehicles, and stationary storage, the battery literature is rapidly growing in size. As a result, researchers in academia and industry find it difficult to keep up with the latest research. Building on previous work with implementing Twitter bots for other scientific domains such as biophotonics (@biophotonicat) and dark matter physics (@higgsinocat), we thought a Twitter bot that tweets the latest research in batteries and energy storage with appropriate filtering would benefit the battery community.
The bot, which is named@electrochemicat, pulls newly published papers from RSS feeds of major battery journals twice a day and uses a classification model trained on arXiv data to evaluate the relevance score of each paper. The arXiv training data consists of paper titles and abstracts from about 32,000 arXiv papers. Using the scikit-learn Python package, the titles and abstracts are tokenized and these features are fed into a logistic regression model that outputs a relevance score ranging from 0% to 100%. To reduce noise, the bot ultimately only tweets papers with a relevance score of at least 50%. In addition, we also use the bot to manually retweet battery-related tweets, news, and job opportunities.
Go follow @electrochemicat to stay up to date with battery research!
Happy 98th Birthday John B. Goodenough!
Texas Engineering @CockrellSchool
"If you live long enough, you never know what's gonna happen!" (insert iconic Goodenough laughter here) Happy 98th birthday to John B. Goodenough, our beloved teacher, inventor of the lithium-ion battery and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. 🥳🤘 https://t.co/FNmCvWFZUP🏭 INDUSTRY NEWS
“Tesla, Nikola Tesla.”
Nikola Motors caused a stir after going public last month with its plan to manufacture fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) trucks. FCEVs combine stored hydrogen and air to produce electricity, with water as the by-product. There are strong arguments for fuel cells, but the infrastructure is almost nonexistent - with only 39 fueling stations in the entire United States.
Investors have hopped on to catch the “next Tesla”, but many others are skeptical. Bloomberg has criticized their claims, calling the truck “inoperable and missing key components to power itself”. Founder of Nikola Motors Trevor Milton defended fuel cells on Linkedin and Twitter:
The ever-so controversial Elon Musk weighed in, calling “fuel cells = fool sells”.
The conflict is not just between Tesla vs Nikola. The rift is with OEMs, with some forging forward like Hyundai, Toyota, some experimenting like JLR, while others shifting away like GM. Governments have divided strategies too, with China ending FCEV subsidies in 2020, while Europe is promoting green hydrogen production through grants, and California working on deploying more hydrogen fueling infrastructure.
KPMG reported in 2017 that 62% of automotive executives believed BEVs will fail due to infrastructure challenges (i.e. charging time), and 78% believed fuel cells would be the ultimate market winner.
We chatted with Alex Grant, Principal at Jade Cove Partners, who gave his perspective:
“Lithium ion batteries (LIBs) and hydrogen were seen as having equal opportunities to decarbonize transport as early as 10 years ago. This was because cathode materials were not yet finely engineered enough to make batteries which would last for long periods of time and have long range.
All that has changed in the 2010s. We now have EVs which can travel almost 1,000km on a single charge, and are some of the highest performing vehicles on the planet. Tens of billions of dollars have been invested in this technology platform to scale it up and reduce its costs, and the wind behind LIB's sails is much stronger than that of hydrogen. Lithium is the perfect atom to store energy on because its nucleus is the smallest of any metal, while the energy of an electron can still be shuttled on or off it. Plus, almost every house in the world has power running to it, and that power can be decarbonized. Power to EV can be efficient in the high 90s range, compared to the combustion of hydrogen or other fuels which will never reach that level without fuel cells.
One word explains why hydrogen will never be prevalent the way EVs will be: infrastructure.”
Related reading:
The Economist: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit
BEV vs FCEV debate between David Rodgers (Toyota) and Helen Perry (Nissan)
Commercial Sodium-Ion Making Waves
Sodium-ion batteries (NIBs) have the potential to be cheaper, more easily produced, and more sustainable with the sheer abundance of sodium in the ocean waters (~100X more abundant than lithium). New developments published in Advanced Energy Materials on NIB materials show high-voltage and high-capacity applications and pave the path forward to compete alongside lithium.
“The key challenge is for the battery to have both high energy density and a good cycle life" says materials engineer Junhua Song from LBNL (see Song’s ACS Energy Letters paper on cathode-electrolyte interaction in NIBs).
NIB startups have recently made big moves towards commercialization: Stanford spinout Natron Energy raised a $35M Series D to develop their Prussian blue chemistry NIBs to “serve the increasing demand for safe, fire code compliant alternatives to both lithium and lead batteries” in the data center and telecom markets.
Across the pond, UK-based Faradion announced its first commercial order from ICM Australia for the AUS market, along with a joint venture partnership with India-based Infraprime Logistics Technologies to attempt to commercialize the technology in EVs, and aims to set up a 1 GWh gigafactory in India by 2021.
Related reading:
Shark Tank for Batteries and Electric Vehicles
Pondering the startup life? LG Chem, Hyundai, and Kia are engaging with our community to host the EV and Battery Startup Challenge through New Energy Nexus!
For our entrepreneurs out there or researchers with a working proof-of-concept, the challenge is an ideal launchpad to commercialization. Interviews are in October and the final selection will attend Hyundai CRADLE in November in Silicon Valley.
The challenge has 2 main focuses:
Battery: management/maintenance, materials, reuse/recycling, and manufacturing and quality control.
EV: charging, components, fleet management, customer service, and components.
The deadline to apply is August 28, 2020. Click here for more information.
✏️ NEWSLETTER READER SURVEY
Check out our tweet-breakdown of your survey responses
🎧 WHAT WE’RE READING/LISTENING TO
1️⃣Battery science matters for a just energy transition: GreenRocks Substack by Ian Morse is an excellent resource discussing metals and minerals for a clean energy future. In this issue, Ian spoke with Greg Less (Technical Director, Battery Lab, University of Michigan), Prof Shirley Meng (Professor of Nanoengineering, UCSD), and Kevin Brigden (Senior Scientist, Greenpeace Research Laboratories).
2️⃣ Getting to 20 Million EVs by 2030: Report by The Brattle Group on what needs to be done in terms of infrastructure, investments, and policies to get to 20M EVs by 2030.
3️⃣ Lessons from benchmarking Chinese BEVs: Analysis by Mckinsey reveals the varying strategies by OEMs towards battery pack and thermal design.
🚀 STARTUP MOVEMENT TRACKER
Natron Energy (California, US) raises $35M Series D for sodium-ion batteries
Mercedes-Benz and Daimler invests equity stake in Farasis Energy (Ganzhou, China)
Fisker Automotive (California, USA) raises $50M for all-electric luxury SUVs
Siemens Energy formed a partnership with thermal energy startup EnergyNest (Norway)
InoBat Auto (Slovakia) receives 10M Euros for customized batteries for electric vehicles
Rivian (California, US) raises $2.5B for electric SUVs and pickups
Farasis Energy (California, US) goes public in Shanghai stock market
🌞 THANKS FOR READING!
About us: Andrew is an engineering science PhD student at the University of Oxford (@ndrewwang). Nicholas is a battery scientist and involved in physical sciences startups based in London (@nicholasyiu).
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