
New Lithium Battery Design Eliminates Costly Cobalt and Nickel - doener
https://www.machinedesign.com/materials/new-lithium-battery-design-eliminates-costly-cobalt-and-nickel
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dmix
> Iron fluorides have more than double lithium’s capacity of traditional
> cobalt- or nickel-based cathodes. In addition, iron is 1/300th the cost of
> cobalt and 1/150th the cost of nickel.

I'm curious how much the cost of cobalt/nickel is relative to the whole
battery's cost.

The lowered geopolitical risks and general availability could be significant
regardless.

~~~
rohan_shah
Lithium itself is ~79%, Both Nickel and Cobalt are less than 4/5% each.

~~~
starky
What do you mean here? Lithium is a tiny portion of a li-ion cell, about 1g in
an 3600mAh 18650 cell. There is significantly more of Nickel, Manganese, and
Cobalt in an NMC cell for example.

~~~
leecb
Perhaps he means 79% of the cost, rather than 79% by mass or volume.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
He'd still be very wrong. Cathode materials are less than 25% of the typical
cell price.

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baybal2
There is an already cobalt free lithium battery chemistry there LiFePO4 — been
in use for more than a decade, and is a preferred one by commercial and heavy
duty EVs because of superior battery life at the cost of capacity.

The new chemistry mentioned has no commercial use cases unless it beats
LiFePO4 in its niche or surpasses mainstream chemistries, which is a big
stretch.

BYD intentionally went full in onto LiFePO4 because they very well foreseen
cobalt shortages.

~~~
p1mrx
LiFePO₄ is also useful for replacing alkaline batteries in small devices,
because the cell voltage (3.2V) is approximately 1.5V x 2.

~~~
baybal2
Add to that, in real world conditions very few battery packs can reach
160-170Wh/kg (and hold it after years of use,) while 140Wh/kg LFP been a
reality for the last 5 years.

They can be more fully charged and discharged, while other lithium cells have
to overprovision massively to extend the battery life. This alone makes it so
that energy density advantage of NCA cells is thrown out of the window if you
count the _effective_ battery pack capacity with BMS sparing cell life.

And in comparison to NCA cells, LFPs are much, much cheaper, exactly because
of the aforementioned cobalt and nickel use. Phosphates are, after all, spent
by tonnes as a fertiliser.

Add to that that have a very, very rare trait among chemical batteries — they
are stable at high temperatures.

This allows for making them work in very hot climates _without_ liquid cooling
which would've added a lot to cost and weight.

It also allows them to take more regen current, and therefore they don't
suffer from as big range reduction from "regen choke" in hot climates. From
the above, we also get their higher charge current tolerance, meaning that
they can be charged faster.

Another very useful trait is their resistance to swell, offgassing and high
dimensional stability. This allows for bigger, higher volume fill ratio cells,
reducing the battery pack size, and thus its housing mass. Near all "brick"
cells are LFP for this exact reason.

They age more evenly, unlike other chemistries, and that too contributes to
ease of making bigger cells, and lessen the need for battery balancing,
reducing charging times.

EV makers are stuck with small 18650s because it is very hard to increase cell
sizes without not worrying about swelling. And the lower volume to area ratio
of 18650s also lead to noticeable mass disadvantage.

~~~
elihu
> Add to that, in real world conditions very few battery packs can reach
> 160-170Wh/kg (and hold it after years of use,)

Here's a tesla battery pack that comes in at 212 Wh/kg if the specifications
are accurate:
[https://www.evwest.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=4&prod...](https://www.evwest.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=4&products_id=463)

> And in comparison to NCA cells, LFPs are much, much cheaper, exactly because
> of the aforementioned cobalt and nickel use. Phosphates are, after all,
> spent by tonnes as a fertiliser.

Is there a good source for LFP that actually is cheaper than plain lithium
ion? I've been looking at doing an electric conversion, and it seems like they
tend to run about $400-500 per kwh, whereas lithium ion tends to be more like
$300-400. I can believe that LFP is cheaper to make, but if that were so, it
seems like it ought to be reflected in retail prices unless vendors are
selling them at a huge markup. (I've only looked into this recently, so I
don't know if battery prices have spiked because of tariffs on China or
something like that or this is just the normal retail price.)

~~~
baybal2
> Here's a tesla battery pack that comes in at 212 Wh/kg if the specifications
> are accurate:

The question is how much of that is overprovisioned for extra battery life

LFP cost more retail, mostly thanks to fewer makers selling on open market,
but lower wholesale price on LFP is something quite certain.

~~~
elihu
I expect that's probably the true capacity; i.e. you wouldn't want to use more
than 80% of that or so if you want the battery to last a long time.

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starky
It is impressive that the article actually addressed the issue of the cathode
expansion, as that was my first worry about using iron, but not one that most
people would be aware of. I'd be interested to hear about the cycle life of
these, the 300 cycles mentioned in the article doesn't exactly inspire
confidence when something like NMC will reach 1000 cycles.

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alkonaut
I wonder how these breakthroughs (if they eventually turn out successful and
make the previous process uneconomical) affect the “gigafactories” under
construction worldwide? Is a change like this going to render a factory
useless if it was built for the “previous” process? Or is this something that
can be retrofitted quite easily into an existing manufacturing process such as
in the Tesla/Panasonic Gigafactory?

~~~
cududa
See the second to last paragraph of the article.

Dr. Goodenough’s glass based battery is incompatible with the gigafactory,
however this would be compatible-ish with existing manufacturing techniques

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eigenloss
dang, please change the link to this:
[https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/09/201090911-gatech.ht...](https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/09/201090911-gatech.html)

Much more information and a link to the actual paper:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-019-0472-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-019-0472-7)

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acd
Is it possible to recycle Lithium batteries to recover the metals in them?
That should be better for the environment and the metal source does not
diminish.

~~~
jillesvangurp
Yes. This is done routinely for laptop and phone batteries.

I googled some numbers for you:
[https://recyclinginternational.com/batteries/the-unknown-
suc...](https://recyclinginternational.com/batteries/the-unknown-success-of-
lithium-ion-battery-recycling/26899/)

Apparently close to 100K tonne of lithium batteries were recycled last year
which amounts to about half of the volume of batteries that should have
reached their end of life around that time.

Not very surprising as the metal is valuable and the recycling process is
fairly straightforward. Apparently, recycled lithium has some nice properties
that results in slightly better batteries even.

I'd expect that with car batteries, recycling will be very big business.
Dumping hundreds of kilos of valuable materials in a land fill is not going to
be a thing. They recycle pretty much all of the steel in cars as well.

~~~
IndrekR
> Apparently, recycled lithium has some nice properties that results in
> slightly better batteries even.

What are those?

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forgotmypw
Without JS, this page is blank. With JS, it is a clusterfuck. Text is below.

New Lithium Battery Design Eliminates Costly Cobalt and Nickel

A new cathode and electrolyte are the key to doing away with these
increasingly scarce metals in lithium batteries.

Stephen Mraz 1 | Sep 12, 2019

Lithium-ion batteries have gained in popularity over the last decade based on
their higher power and small size. But their popularity is straining the
world’s supply of cobalt and nickel, two metals used in lithium batteries. As
a result, prices for those metals have skyrocketed.

To develop alternative designs for lithium-based batteries with less reliance
on those scarce metals, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology
have been looking into new cathode and electrolytes to replace the expensive
metals and traditional liquid electrolyte with lower cost transition metal
fluorides and a solid polymer electrolyte.

“Electrodes made from transition metal fluorides have long shown stability
problems and rapid failure, leading to significant skepticism about their
ability to be used in next generation batteries,” says Gleb Yushin, a
professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering. “But
we’ve shown that when used with a solid polymer electrolyte, metal fluorides
show remarkable stability, even at higher temperatures, which could lead to
safer, lighter, and less-expensive lithium-ion batteries.”

In typical lithium-ion batteries, energy is released during the transfer of
lithium ions between an anode and a cathode, with the cathode typically made
of lithium and transition metals such as cobalt, nickel, and manganese. Ions
flow between the electrodes through a liquid electrolyte.

The Georgia Tech researchers fabricated a new type of cathode from iron
fluoride and a solid polymer electrolyte nanocomposite. Iron fluorides have
more than double lithium’s capacity of traditional cobalt- or nickel-based
cathodes. In addition, iron is 1/300th the cost of cobalt and 1/150th the cost
of nickel.

To produce such a cathode, the researchers inserted a solid polymer
electrolyte into a prefabricated iron fluoride electrode. They then hot
pressed the entire structure to increase density and eliminate voids.

The polymer-based electrolyte is flexible so it can accommodate the swelling
of the iron fluoride while cycling and forms a stable and flexible interphase
with iron fluoride. Traditionally, the swelling and side reactions have been
key problems when using iron fluoride in batteries.

“Cathodes made from iron fluoride have enormous potential because of their
high capacity, low material costs, and the broad availability of iron,” Yushin
says. “But changes in volume during cycling, as well as parasitic side
reactions with liquid electrolytes and other degradation issues, have limited
their use previously. Using a solid electrolyte with elastic properties solves
many of these problems.”

The researchers then tested several variations of the new solid-state
batteries to analyze their performance over more than 300 charging and
discharging cycles at a temperature of 122⁰F. They found that the new
batteries outperformed previous designs using metal fluoride even when these
were kept cool at room temperatures.

The researchers determined that the key to the better battery performance was
the solid polymer electrolyte. In previous attempts using metal fluorides, it
was believed metallic ions moved to the cathode’s surface to eventually
dissolve into the liquid electrolyte, causing a capacity loss, particularly at
elevated temperatures. In addition, metal fluorides catalyzed the rapid
decomposition of liquid electrolytes when cells operated above 100⁰F. However,
at the connection between the solid electrolyte and the cathode, the solid
electrolyte remains stable, preventing the electrolyte from dissolving.

“The polymer electrolyte we used was common, but many other solid electrolytes
and other battery or electrode architectures, such as core-shell particle
morphologies, should be able to dramatically mitigate or even fully prevent
parasitic side reactions and attain stable performance characteristics,” says
Kostiantyn Turcheniuk, a research scientist in Yushin’s lab.

In the future, the researchers aim to develop new and improved solid
electrolytes to enable fast charging and to combine solid and liquid
electrolytes in new designs fully compatible with conventional cell
manufacturing used in large battery factories.

~~~
_Microft
Firefox' reader mode deals well with the page by the way.

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scythe
So this is pretty cool, as a GT alum. Caveats are:

\- The article contrasts the price of iron and cobalt. It’s true, but fluoride
is more expensive than iron. Still cheaper than cobalt, though!

\- This is a very new chemistry, which means a lot of scale-up work will have
to be done before it becomes commercial. Other technologies have stalled at
this phase, like nanostructured Si anodes and S cathodes. In particular,
polymer electrolytes can be easy to manufacture or not.

\- Li-ion batteries typically perform better at higher temperatures. The tests
in this article were performed at 50 C, which may not translate to practical
performance in an environment which is often below 0 C. Also, 300 isn’t really
that many cycles.

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RRRA
When are we getting lithium graphite batteries which are supposed to be not
dense and a lot safer than LiPo? I mean, to the point you can buy one for
toys, drones, cell, etc

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m3kw9
Maybe one day they will eliminate the lithium needed as well

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tasubotadas
Should I sell my Cobalt futures then? Or is it one of those "battery-
breakthroughs" that we are not going to hear again ever?

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layoutIfNeeded
I’ll believe it when it ships in my phone.

Otherwise the usual response to battery tech news applies: k keep me posted.

~~~
fortran77
So you don't want to know about _anything_ until it's available inside phones
that you can buy today? I personally like to know what may be on the horizon.
It's interesting to read about it, and remember it one the day it arrives (or
something else does)!

~~~
toast0
Not the OP, but... Strictly in phones I can buy today? Not really. Plausibly
in phones (or something in a normal household) in the next 3-6 months, sure.

I'm just tired of hearing about battery advances in labs that never make it
out to me. Just let me know when I should be prepared to change my purchasing
decisions.

~~~
takeda
> Plausibly in phones (or something in a normal household) in the next 3-6
> months, sure.

I don't know, I remember reading 25 years ago about this awesome technology
called OLED that instead of blocking light it actually lights up and you can
even bend the display!

