Harvard's Office of Technology Development has now granted an exclusive technology license to Adden Energy.Īdden Energy has closed a seed round with $5.15 million in funding led by Primavera Capital Group, with participation by Rhapsody Venture Partners and MassVentures. The battery also offers high energy density and a level of material stability that overcomes the safety challenges posed by some other lithium batteries, according to results published in Nature and other journals. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). That could be a game changer, " said Xin Li, associate professor of materials science at Harvard John A. "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. The startup has now been granted technology license from Harvard University to scale innovative lithium-metal battery technology for commercial deployment. My guess is five to 10 years.”Įditor’s Note: The original article incorrectly stated that solid-state battery designs use ceramics a few, in fact, are designed to use glass.NEW YORK: US-based startup Adden Energy has achieved solid-state battery charge rates as fast as three minutes with over 10, 000 cycles in a lifetime in lab settings. “Battery companies say one thing, automakers say another thing. How long will it be before we see this thing in a car? “Depends on who you ask,” Li says with a laugh. He calls that ultrahigh, and indeed, studies of lithium-ion battery degradation have found that failure comes quickly as you ramp up from 1 to 3 milliamps/square cm. “We can cycle 10,000 cycles at a current density of close to 10 milliamps per square centimeter,” Li says. That’s the most current in a given area that a battery can handle over many charge/discharge cycles without forming dendrites. Instead they make their anodes out of lithium metal, which they describe in the Nature paper as the holy grail because of its high current density. The engineers were able to use this power to ditch graphite, today’s standard material for anodes because of its anti-dendritic properties. The battery thus retains its integrity even after extended use. “We designed the chemistry of the layer so that the dendrite is like the screw-when it meets the electrolyte there will be a chemical reaction that generates a local stress field, like an anchor does to a screw.”īecause of this blocking maneuver dendrites never get big enough to cause a short circuit, to vacuum up much lithium or to disrupt the ceramic electrolyte. “Drill the hole in the drywall, drive your screw through that anchor, and when you feel the tension, the screw is tightly fixed,” he says. When the seed of any would-be dendrite penetrates one of the less stable layers it causes localized decomposition, which cuts off further growth. Li compares the design to the plastic sleeve that anchors a screw. Such dendrites, as they are called, tend to get longer with each cycle of charging and discharging, and if one of them finally reaches from the anode to the cathode it will short out the battery. The heat can then ignite first the cell itself and then a neighboring cell, setting off a cascade that is known as a thermal runaway.īy alternating layers of more and less stable solid electrolytes, the Harvard researches are able to make sure that any incipient dendrite gets nipped in the bud. What’s new here is a sandwich-like layering of different materials meant to choke off the growth of lithium-metal filaments. This step greatly reduces the risk of fire. Like most solid-state designs, the cells use a ceramic electrolyte instead of the organic liquids seen in today’s Li-ion batteries. He wouldn’t name companies, but he did indicate that the interested parties were in the automotive sector. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science described their work in Nature.Įven so, Li says, there has already been a good deal of interest in commercializing the technology. Li and his colleagues at Harvard’s John A. “Scaling up to EVs is not a trivial problem-there are many engineering aspects we’ll have to figure out later,” Xin Li, associate professor of material, tells IEEE Spectrum. In an EV it would have to be about the size of a rather thick textbook. Right now the laboratory prototype is the size of a coin. In an EV such a battery should charge in 10 to 20 minutes and last for the lifetime of the vehicle. Engineers at Harvard have developed a solid-state lithium-ion battery that charges up fast and charges and discharges many times without degrading much.
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