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Is it possible to charge an electric vehicle in three minutes?
Adden Energy is founded by Xin Li, William Fitzhugh, and Luhan Ye in 2021. The startup received an exclusive license from Harvard University, where the developers worked as Ph.D. students at the LIS Harvard laboratory.
Well, the concept is still a laboratory-scale prototype. As per the journal “Nature,” the solid-state battery is the size of a button cell. In the laboratory experiment, it resulted in a charging time of three minutes and a service life of more than 10,000 charging cycles.
The features include high energy density, and the material stability is good. It is concluded that the solid-state battery is superior to other lithium batteries. The goal of the start-up is to develop a pouch cell first, which will be the size of a palm, and then turn it into a battery size for a vehicle.
The advantage of solid-state technology is that it is built with anodes made of pure lithium metal. The proportion of non-productive graphite is also under control, which increases the energy density. The problem with lithium ions is the accumulation of the electrodes that results in stalactites: deposits in the form of needle-shaped holes that penetrate the battery’s boundary layers, causing short circuits and subsequent fires.
To handle this problem, the new startup came up with a multi-layer battery with different materials and stabilities between the anode and cathode.
The multi-material and multi-layer construction of the battery prevents the ingress of lithium dendrites. It is not stopping the problem completely but controlling and containing the hard-learned situation.
According to Luhan Ye, co-author of preliminary work on the new rechargeable battery technology, “Our strategy of incorporating instability to stabilize the battery seems counterintuitive.” “But just like a dowel can guide and control a screw going into a wall, our multi-layer design can guide and control the growth of dendrites.”
The structure of the battery has been described as a sandwich by the researchers: At first, it is the lithium metal anode, then a coating of graphite. The first electrolyte layer is followed by the second electrolyte layer. The whole thing is completed by another layer of the cathode.
The process supports binding the lithium more stably with the first electrolyte, but is receptive to dendrite intrusion; however, the second electrolyte binds lithium more weakly and is immune to dendrites.
The design controls and contains the dendrites so they can reach the second layer, and hence the shorting of the battery is prevented.
Source:- Auto Motor Sport