Friday, 29 March 2024
EV NewsNews

10,000 cycle, 3-minute charge battery advance made by startup

Harvard’s Office of Technology Development has announced the granting of a licence to startup Adden Energy Inc, which has built a prototype solid state battery said to be capable of a three-minute charge and a 10,000 cycle lifetime.

Added to the impressive numbers, a key issue of battery safety is apparently overcome with what the innovators describe as “a level of material stability that overcomes the safety challenges posed by some other lithium batteries.” The often overlooked importance of battery stability has come into greater focus as electric vehicle fleet operators have sought to reduce insurance bills, which have been taking into account the fire risk of lithium ion cells.

The innovation came from the lab of  Xin Li, PhD, Associate Professor of Materials Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The coin cell prototype has already achieved the aforementioned metrics and had the test results published in journals such as Nature.

“If you want to electrify vehicles, a solid-state battery is the way to go,” said Li, who is a scientific advisor to Adden Energy. “We set out to commercialize this technology because we do see our technology as unique compared to other solid-state batteries. We have achieved in the lab 5,000 to 10,000 charge cycles in a battery’s lifetime, compared with 2,000 to 3,000 charging cycles for even the best in class now, and we don’t see any fundamental limit to scaling up our battery technology. That could be a game changer.”

Adden Energy’s CTO Luhan Ye makes a point on the impressive numbers in relation to the car market, stating “Electric vehicles cannot remain a luxury fashion, literally the ‘one percent’ of vehicles on the road, if we are to make progress toward a clean energy future, and the U.S. won’t have a used-car market if EV batteries last only 3 to 5 years. The technology needs to be accessible to everyone. Extending the lifetime of the batteries, as we’re doing here, is an important part of that.”

Back in Europe, where the European Union has a pin sharp focus on the future of batteries and the associated metals required to power the EV industry, it  has recently been pointed out that an eBike uses as little as 250 times less raw material than the EV car. Pairing this breakthrough to a more smaller and arguably more sustainable vehicle type could make for a drastic reduction in the need for raw materials and a longer product lifecycle.

Ye added on the technology’s expected longevity: “Typically, lithium-metal anodes in other solid-state designs develop dendrites, twig-like growths that can gradually penetrate through the electrolyte to the cathode. We defeat the growth of dendrites before they can cause damage, by novel structural and material designs. As a result, the device can sustain its high performance over a long lifetime. Our recent study shows that this nice feature can also be maintained at scale-up.

With the breakthrough has come an initial burst of investment. A seed round has raised $5.15 million in funding from Primavera Capital, with further input from Rhapsody Venture Partners and MassVentures.