Tech Dive: Current Collectors
This article is part of Intercalation Station’s paid series where we dive deeper into companies and the tech they’re working on, which we are releasing for free in this issue! Reach out for any inquiries, and thanks for being a supporter!
🗣 A Word From Our Sponsor 🗣
Today's Intercalation Station is brought to you by Colabra, an R&D platform that helps scientific teams achieve better research outcomes.
Back when I was a scientist, I remember how complex my research would get. Research progress was managed with Powerpoint decks and Gantt charts, which made feedback loops slow and caused us to miss our deadlines. Data was stored on local drives, which meant that institutional knowledge was lost as researchers came and went. And my colleagues weren't in the habit of talking with each other in the day-to-day, which made all of our work feel isolated.
The Colabra team built their product to help scientific companies fix these organizational issues (information silos, data disaggregation, research irreproducibility) by introducing continuous improvement, data sharing, and workflow automation to the team. All Colabra features are free for the first 5 seats (everything in the demo below), so there’s no risk in getting started!
What are current collectors?
Current collectors aren’t the most attention-seeking component of a battery. 2D metal foils have been used for decades, with the main innovations being driving the thickness lower to increase energy density via deadweight reduction.
Over the last 5 years, it appears that lithium-ion batteries will reach a plateau in terms of performance, and will have various flaws as well as safety defects. Research has been focused on alternative materials, structures, pre-treatment methods, coatings, etc. When it comes to translating these to industry, we need an alternative as low-cost as current baseline current collectors to be considered.
In this technology dive issue, we explore 3 companies that are working on current collector innovations: Prieto Battery, Addionics, and Soteria Battery Innovation Group.
Review papers
The questions we’re looking at
Summary: What benefits will this novel current collector have?
Technology: How does this technology work?
Milestone: How much funding have they raised, and what kind of partnerships do they have?
Employees: How many people are on their team?
