Michigan battery company Sakti3, a spinout of the University of Michigan, which is financed by the worlds top cleantech fund, Khosla Ventures, and the worlds largest automotive investor, General Motors Ventures, has claimed that the company’s solid state battery will be able to double the range of an electric car. The solid state batteries would enable a vehicle like the Tesla Model S to travel 480 miles on single charge.
Not content with overcoming the ‘range anxiety’ challenge for electric vehicle (EV) users the Michigan startup also reckons it will be able to produce the batteries commercially for around $100 per kilowatt hour which halves the figure currently achievable by lithium ion batteries today.
Sakti3 also claims that its batteries will be safer to operate than the current standard ones.
This week Sakti3’s founder Ann Marie Sastry revealed that the company’s solid state Li-ion battery will be able to double the range of an electric car or make mobile phones last twice as long between charges.
Sakti3 said the energy density for the company’s latest battery cell is 1100 watt hours per liter, which equates to nine hours of usage for a smartwatch or a 480 mile electric car range. So far the energy-density claims have yet to be independently verified but in March 2014 Sakti3 became an affiliate of the US Department of Energy’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR).
Sakti3s technology enables a solid-state battery to be produced with a similar thin-film deposition process used to make flat panel displays and photovoltaic solar cells. Sakti3 also said the company’s test packs have been made on ‘fully scalable equipment’ and Sastry indicated that the technology would be for sale within two years. The company is expected to target wearable electronics before moving on to address the automotive sector.
As far back as 2006 Sastry and her colleagues started working on complex mathematical optimization schemes to find out which of the many variables that make up an electric car battery – energy, power, mass, volume, cost, safety – could give the best results. The calculations pointed to the need to remove the liquid electrolyte found in conventional lithium-ion batteries together with all of the extra packaging that a liquid electrolyte requires.
The vacuum deposition process Sakti3 uses to manufacture its cells sees the layers of the thin-film battery being deposited sequentially – first there is the cathode, then the current collector, then the interlayer, anode and such like.
Source: http://www.electronics-eetimes.com/en/solid-state-battery-advance-removes-range-anxiety-fears.html?cmp_id=7&news_id=222922113&page=1
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