NEO Battery Materials, a low-cost silicon-anode materials developer that enables longer-running, rapid-charging lithium-ion batteries, announced technological advancements to its silicon-anode technology — longer battery capacity retention while sustaining low costs.
NEO’s engineering team successfully modified the properties of existing additives to achieve the two-way coating enhancements. The new coating methods are simple yet feasible and employ widely-used additives to maintain low manufacturing costs.
Implementation improves critical battery cell performance metrics, offering:
- Longer capacity retention
- Higher, steady Coulombic efficiency (a measure of capacity retention), and iii) faster-charging rates.
Coulombic efficiency is the foremost metric that determines capacity retention in battery cycling tests. NEO’s silicon-anode, NBMSiDE, demonstrated record-high Coulombic efficiency levels that meet or exceed industry standards and similar commercial products. This result demonstrates the product’s potency in full cell designs based on pure 100% silicon or silicon-graphite mixture anodes.
With optimism in advancements, NEO is reproducing and optimizing the product for the subsequent phases of NBMSiDE commercialization.
The two-way coating enhancement also enables NBMSiDE to be compatible with carbon-based (carbonaceous) materials. This implies that silicon-carbon composite (Si-C) and silicon-graphite anode development are now feasible for full cell designs. Due to mounting working partner and industry demand, NEO Battery Materials will release a new Si-C anode product into the NBMSiDE portfolio, with sample tests to be conducted soon.
Two-way coating enhancement
The first coating enhancement extensively utilizes the advantages of polymer characteristics to maximize the polymer coating processibility. This further stabilizes the silicon surface during volume expansion in battery cycling tests. Intensely prohibiting adverse side reactions (i.e., irreversible lithium consumption) on the silicon surface also suppresses anode delamination from the current collector.
As a result, battery cell performance is directly improved with enhanced Coulombic efficiency and rate capability levels with reasonable overall specific capacity.
The second coating enhancement deploys additional protective layers on the silicon surface. Like the first enhancement, the additional layers suppress adverse side reactions in which lithium-ions are consumed on the silicon surface. The layers also add mechanical strength to hamper rapid anode delamination. This coating method has exhibited increased Coulombic efficiencies with prolonged capacity retention.
Filed Under: Batteries, Technology News