High-Speed Electrodeposition of Textured Monolithic Lithiated Transition Metal Oxide Cathodes for High Energy and Fast Charging Li-Ion Batteries.

Abstract

Xerion Advanced Battery Corp, founded in 2010, is in the process of commercializing two battery technologies: a) a nanoscale metal foam, produced through electrodeposition, that enables high performance alloy-type active material based electrodes, and b) a single-step electroplating process to manufacture lithiated transition metal oxide (LTMO) cathodes.Xerion’s process benefits from the combined synthesis and electrode formation in just one step – revolutionizing the current commercial slurry-electrode manufacturing process (>20 steps). Certain LTMO’s can be grown as a monolithic structure up to 500 m thick (~ 5 times thicker than state of the art), while simultaneously controlling the crystalline orientation, porosity, surface area and morphology. Ultra-thick textured electrodes significantly decrease the volume, thickness and weight of the resulting battery without compromising run time or power-density. In addition, the deposition process can be applied onto arbitrary shapes giving way to storage solutions that could be integrated as structural and load bearing components leading to low form-factors, ultra-light weight solutions, and new designs. Safety is also improved because conductive agents are not added to the electrode eliminating secondary conductive pathways, which can prevent hard shorts that lead to disastrous thermal run-away events.The transformative electroplating process can utilize low purity feedstocks instead of highly purified lithium hydroxides and lithium carbonates to produce highly pure Li-ion battery cathodes at a fraction of the cost. This feedstock flexibility arises from selective solubility and differences in redox potential of the desired material and the undesired impurity phases. While commercial active material manufacturing requires feedstock purity >99.5%, purities as low as 50% have been demonstrated with Xerion’s molten salt process. As a result, cost modeling has shown that cost to manufacture cells using this process is reduced by up to 50% even when using an expensive cathode chemistry like LiCoO2. The single-step manufacturing method that produces safe batteries with high energy, fast charging, and high-power characteristics, while simultaneously reducing the cost, is possible through the innovative technology being brought to the market by Xerion Advanced Battery Corporation.