New Manufacturing Technique Halves Cost of Lithium-Ion Batteries

An anonymous reader writes: Experts in materials science at MIT have developed a new process for creating lithium-ion batteries that will drop the associated production costs by half. The researchers say fundamental battery construction techniques have been refined over the past two decades, but not re-thought. "The new battery design is a hybrid between flow batteries and conventional solid ones: In this version, while the electrode material does not flow, it is composed of a similar semisolid, colloidal suspension of particles. Chiang and Carter refer to this as a 'semisolid battery.' This approach greatly simplifies manufacturing, and also makes batteries that are flexible and resistant to damage, says Chiang. ... Instead of the standard method of applying liquid coatings to a roll of backing material, and then having to wait for that material to dry before it can move to the next manufacturing step, the new process keeps the electrode material in a liquid state and requires no drying stage at all. Using fewer, thicker electrodes, the system reduces the conventional battery architecture's number of distinct layers, as well as the amount of nonfunctional material in the structure, by 80 percent."

Comments

The future is coming.

[riverat1]

If this pans out it probably means the end to the claims that solar PV and wind power can't affordably supply us with all of our electricity needs. It also makes electric cars all that much more affordable. Elon Musk may need to redesign his battery factory.

Re:The future is coming.

[Nethemas the Great]

That does bring up an interesting question. I wonder just how flexible Elon's new factory, or others for that matter, are with regards to adopting process improvements such as this when they arise.

Re:The future is coming.

[nine-times]

The summary highlights price, but also says, "Using fewer, thicker electrodes, the system reduces the conventional battery architecture's number of distinct layers, as well as the amount of nonfunctional material in the structure, by 80 percent." So I'm left wondering, does this also have a substantial improvement in terms of size/weight of the batteries?

Because from what I remember reading, a big part of the difficulty in engineering electric cars is that batteries are big and heavy. When you add enough batteries to power the car, you've also added a bunch of weight, which means that you now need to add even more batteries to compensate for the energy needed to move the weight of all the batteries you've added.

Re:Ahm Mo Call

[WindBourne]

Yeah, if this was somebody else, I would agree with you.
BUT, this is Dr. chiang who has been fairly accurate with all that he publishes.
As such, I would be willing to guess that he is a lot closer to 100 than others.

Re:Ahm Mo Call

[Anubis IV]

[...] why the hell would we expect "[e]xperts in materials science at MIT" to be able to accurately calculate the manufacturing and production costs (and thus savings) for a novel battery technology?

Because, this isn't their first rodeo. When they weren't busy being experts in materials science at MIT, they were busy founding A123. A123 remains a successful company, but they sold it off, continued doing research at MIT, and now have something new that they'd like to make, so they're ramping up a new company to do it.