'They ditched flow-batteries & went back to looking at li-ion cells' 'Cells can be made in 1/5th the time of conventional li-ion'
http://ecomento.com/2015/06/29/24m-battery-game-changing-technology/ 24M battery could be game changing technology for electric cars June 29, 2015 | Steve Hanley [image http://cdn.ecomento.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/24m-electric-car-battery-740x425.jpg 24M Semisolid Li-ion cell video https://youtu.be/nQi9eWUjV6c 24M Semisolid Li-ion 24M Technologies Jun 19, 2015 24M solves the grand challenge of energy storage with the invention of the semisolid lithium-ion battery, a revolutionary technology for the architects of our energy future. ] “Game changing” is a phrase that is often overused today. Everything from a new way of folding laundry to a new toothbrush design is trumpeted as “game changing.” At MIT, a group of dedicated researchers headed by Yet-Ming Chiang say they have come up with a new way of manufacturing lithium ion batteries that really is a game changer. Why? Because the process they have invented will not only drive down the cost of batteries, it will also become a model for how products are produced in the future. Chiang is the same researcher who started A123, an early leader in lithium ion battery technology that went bankrupt a few years ago. Its assets are now owned by Wanxiang of China. Chiang and his colleagues have been toiling in obscurity since 2010. That’s when they founded 24M, a start-up company they hoped would revolutionize flow battery technology. Flow batteries use liquid electrolytes to store electrical energy. Their principal advantage over lithium ion is much longer life and infinite scalability. Need more storage capacity? Simply increase the size of the storage tanks that hold the electrolyte and you’re done. Two years ago, Chiang’s team ran a simulation to determine just how large a flow battery would have to be to be suitable for large scale grid storage. Their computer simulation said it would be enormous – about the size of a typical nuclear power plant. Such a system would be too big and too costly to ever be commercially viable, so the team did what only a small group of researchers can do. They did a rapid pirouette away from flow batteries and went back to looking at lithium-ion batteries. Three years of hard work and long hours went right down the drain. Because the team was starting from scratch, it decided to take a look at how lithium-ion batteries were made. That’s when the Eureka! moment came, the realization that there was a better, faster, and cheaper way to make lithium-ion batteries – a way that no other company was using, not even Panasonic or Tesla. To understand this breakthrough, we have to go back in time to the days of data storage on magnetic tape. The manufacturing procedure, known as roll to roll processing, involved applying a thin layer of magnetic material to a thin layer of metal or plastic, then drying everything in large ovens. The only way to make more was to expand the size of the factory and add more drying ovens in longer lines. As data storage technology shifted to CD’s from magnetic tape, Sony, which was the largest manufacturer of magnetic tape in the world, found itself with lots of unused factory space and machinery. Sony was intent on developing new long lasting batteries for its hand held camcorders. It practically invented the first commercial lithium-ion battery, using many thin electrodes kept separated by tiny layers of insulating material that allowed electrolyte to flow between them. Sony engineers figured out how to use the old magnetic tape process to make the electrodes. Its process became the standard for making lithium ion batteries and is still widely used today. While scientists around the world are burning the midnight oil trying to invent new battery chemisty, Chiang and his team went back and re-examined how lithium batteries are made. They wound up discarding 80% of the structure inside the battery that has nothing to do with storing electricity. Then they increased the size of the electrodes, packing much more storage capacity into the same space. Chiang says his new manufacturing process needs only a $100,000,000 machine to produce the same energy storage capacity as the $5 billion dollar Tesla Gigafactory. He envisions battery prices using his process to drop to around $85 per kWh by 2020. Tesla hopes its batteries will cost less then $200 per kWh by then. Most industry observers say batteries that cost under $100 per kWh are what’s needed to make electric cars stop being the playthings of the wealthy and affordable by mainstream buyers, the same people who buy Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas today. That’s the kind of game changing technology the world will need to finally turn its back on burning fossil fuels. [© ecomento.com] https://fortune.com/2015/06/22/battery-tesla-challenger/ This startup is looking to revolutionize lithium ion batteries by Katie Fehrenbacher June 22, 2015 [images https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/24mweb_128-2.jpg?quality=80&w=840&h=485&crop=1 https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/cell-by-cell-2.png?w=1024 An image of a cross section of a conventional lithium ion battery and a battery made by 24M.Image courtesy of 24M https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/24mweb_131-2-2.jpg?quality=80&w=1024 A battery made by 24M, which the startup says is lower cost, safer, and conformable.Jacob Belcher Jake Belcher Photography 2015 ] A battery made by 24M, a startup in Camridge, MA. Photograph by Jacob Belcher A new stealth startup with a very big idea for batteries has come out of stealth mode. All eyes have been on Tesla’s planned massive battery factory, under construction just outside of Reno. But on the other side of the country, in Cambridge, Mass., you’ll find an undercover startup that’s been toiling away at a totally different way to design and make what company executives say is a better battery for the power grid and electric cars. The company, 24M, which came out of stealth mode on Monday, is working on a new type of lithium ion battery that it says is vastly cheaper than what’s currently on the market. The company describes their innovation as “the most significant advancement in lithium-ion technology in more than two decades,” and if the battery can deliver on its promise it could help deliver low cost batteries for important new emerging markets. Over the years there have been dozens of young startups that have tried to disrupt the battery industry with new ideas. But few actually pull it off. 24M will face intense competition in a crowded market that favors large companies like the battery giants Panasonic and LG in Asia. MIT battery scientist Yet-Ming Chiang founded 24M in 2010 by spinning it out of his previous battery company A123 Systems. The idea was to create a battery that could store more energy while shrinking the other materials in the battery the he believed could be made smaller. Chiang wondered if there was a way to significantly grow the electrode, which is the heart of the battery and used for charging and discharging. Meanwhile, he wanted to make parts smaller like the separators between the electrodes, which keep the anode and cathode segregated, or the currency collector, which receives electrons from the external battery circuit. Now five years later, Chiang and his team of 50 people, say they’ve found a way to ditch more than 80% of the non-energy storing materials, and increase the size of the electrode by over five times compared to a traditional lithium ion battery. If a cross section of a standard lithium ion battery looks like a very complex seven layer cake, a cross section of a 24M battery looks like a two layer cake with a hefty anode and cathode. Chiang tells Fortune that if the company can show that its process is superior to the standard, he would expect that everyone would want to use it to make lithium ion batteries. “For me, the ultimate win would be if this would become the defacto standard for battery production around the world,” said Chiang. Designing a battery this way enables an entirely new way of manufacturing it. The team calls 24M’s battery “semi-solid” because the development starts with the energy storage material — the electrode — in a semi-solid, fluid state. Traditional lithium ion battery manufacturing makes thin, solid electrodes. The way 24M makes the semi-solid electrode is part of the company’s secret sauce, so it’s a little unclear just exactly how it does it. But Chiang says the team uses “pretty interesting nanotechnology,” to engineer how the batteries conduct electricity. Traditional lithium ion battery manufacturing largely uses roll-to-roll processing, which takes a thin wet coating of the electrode material, applies it to a thin metal foil and then dries the electrodes in big drying ovens. When the thin electrodes are finally dry and hardened, they are snapped together to make a cell and the liquid electrolyte is added. Chiang says most battery factories churn out batteries this way because it was the dominant technology adopted from magnetic tape factories in Japan in the 1980’s and 1990’s. That industry has tanked as data storage technology has evolved, but the processes are still deeply embedded in lithium ion battery production. The problem with this method, according to Chiang, is that it’s complex, it takes a long time, and there’s limited ways to scale up the process other than to just make the battery manufacturing line longer. This requires a lot of money upfront to build a huge factory. 24M’s factory designs remove the big dryers, vastly reduces the number of steps, and enables a factory to be made in a more modular way, requiring less upfront investment. The company says its battery cells can be made in one-fifth of the time of a conventional battery. A few blocks south of Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, 24M has a 32,000 square foot pilot facility where it’s churned out about 9,000 early batteries in this new way. The company is already shipping these sample batteries to partners and potential customers. The batteries could be installed in test applications in the field as early as 2016. 24M wants to build a larger production plant in 2017. With its simpler manufacturing, 24M’s batteries are supposed to be much less expensive than standard lithium ion batteries. By 2020, the company says its battery costs will be less than $100 per kilowatt-hour. Some of the most low cost lithium ion batteries coming out of rival factories today are closer to $200 and $250 per kilowatt-hour. Tesla is looking to lower the cost of its batteries, from these already low levels, by a third through both massive scale and improvements in chemistry. Chiang, and 24M’s CEO, serial tech entrepreneur Throop Wilder, are eager to describe 24M’s technology as “a platform” that could disrupt the current lithium ion battery industry. The idea is that any company could use this design and manufacturing plan to make any type of battery using mostly off-the-shelf parts, equipment and materials, just combined in a new way. But the 24M executives aren’t interested in licensing out their tech to start. They want to make batteries. The sample batteries, and the first of their batteries to market, will likely be used on the grid by utilities and at commercial buildings. There’s a growing market for utilities and building owners to buy energy from battery farms during peak grid times or paired with new solar and wind farms. After grid batteries, 24M could sell batteries for electric vehicles, too. To date, 24M has raised $50 million in two rounds of funding from VCs Charles River Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners, as well as industrial and manufacturing partners including Japanese industrial company IHI, and Thai conglomerate PTT. That venture capitalists were willing to back an early stage battery technology is unusual in this day and age. Many venture capitalists got burned by investing in young, manufacturing-focused energy tech years ago, and the battery industry has been littered with new startups that have tried to build large battery factories and stumbled. Chiang knows this side of the industry all too well. A123 System, his previous company, started raising money from VCs a decade ago. It went public with one of the largest IPOs of 2009, making its early investors a profit. But as A123 Systems built up its production, and the market for electric vehicles grew more slowly than anticipated, the company struggled and eventually filed for bankruptcy. In 2013 Chinese giant Wanxiang Group bought most of the assets, while other companies bought various divisions. Chiang, who’s still an advisor to A123 Systems, says A123 was “ahead of its time,” and points out that the company is now in a good place, doubling its current manufacturing. But the ups and downs of the founder’s former company highlight just how difficult the battery market is for a startup that’s looking to do something brand new. [© fortune.com] ... http://24-m.com/technology/ A More Efficient Cell Design http://www.mytechbits.com/new-technology-by-samsung-to-double-the-smartphones-battery-life/9811900/ New Technology by Samsung to Double ... Battery Life http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2415369/samsung-and-lg-develop-advanced-battery-tech-to-extend-life-of-mobile-devices Samsung,LG ... 2x capacity of lithium-ion batteries Jun 29 2015 ... http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1098904_solid-state-batteries-already-powering-electric-cars-bluecars-in-fact Bolloré ... lithium-metal-polymer batteries ... claims the solid-state design is safer ... doesn't use a flammable liquid electrolyte ... ... http://www.treehugger.com/gadgets/additives-could-prevent-fires-lithium-ion-batteries.html Additives could prevent fires in lithium-ion batteries June 29, 2015 ... http://www.carandtravel.eu/?p=13522 More efficient, cheaper EV batteries coming Lithium-ion car batteries that cost half as much as today's, but generate twice the ... This would solve the two key impediments to large scale electric cars use ... 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