Last week I was in the UK for the Faraday Institution LEAP project’s industry day, where I chaired a panel discussion. LEAP is the successor to the Degradation project and currently runs three main workstreams - one on squeezing out the maximum from incumbent high-Ni NMC chemistries, a second on low-cost LMFP and blends with NMC, and the third a more speculative punt at high energy “anode-free”…
Morrow Batteries filed for bankruptcy recently. Sadly, it was all too predictable, almost as predictable as the online handwringing lamenting Europe’s lack of competitiveness in batteries which now familiarly accompanies similar news. There’s plenty of diagnosis about what went wrong elsewhere, which I won’t try to cover here. What I’m not seeing however is consideration of the idea that the…
Some (as always, strictly personal) thoughts regarding Northvolt’s recently announced Chapter 11 filing. Amongst all the confident hot takes out there speculating what went wrong I think it’s worth taking a brief step back. While at UU I, and others in the group, had the opportunity to visit Northvolt in 2017 when they were still around 60 employees. A key part of their thesis was that their plan…
Swedish media are reporting (here and here) that Northvolt encouraged employees at their Skellefteå plant to continue to work in areas affected by a leak of ammonia, well in excess of legal exposure limits, on the basis that they had PPE which could tolerate the higher levels. I haven’t seen much reporting in English on this, but if the reporting is even remotely correct then this is concerning.…
Original post at Twitter here Have you read the new perspective article by me, James Frith and Ulderico Ulissi yet? Just one of the many topics we discuss is the gap between theory and practice in terms of metrics such as energy density, which I’ll briefly elaborate on here. Specific energy (Wh/kg) and energy density (Wh/L) are two very important metrics for batteries (though far from the only…
Original post at Twitter here There is a new paper out comparing AC & DC methods for resistance determination in batteries which frustrates me, for several reasons. Some of these reasons are purely self-centred but others I think reflect many problems with publishing today.
Original post at Twitter here So I had been meaning for a while to do a little commentary on the Tesla 4680 teardown organised by The Limiting Factor, partly because teardown is part of my day job… so here come some observations, starting with the “part 1” video: 4:27 - Cell voltage is pretty low, 0.14 V - which is way below the usual 0% SoC. The cell is dented, but the voltage is not zero, so…
Original post at Twitter here Are Prussian Blue analogue (PBA)-based Na-ion batteries safe? Safer than LFP? It’s been argued to me a number of times that no oxygen in the cathode means no thermal runaway, but is that true? I think the evidence suggests no, and the hazards may actually be quite significant:
Original post at Twitter here Looking for some feedback from my followers regarding the future of my website, in particular the electrochemistry & battery chem tutorials.. What started out as a barely-visited personal website while a postdoc has become seemingly a quite popular resource for knowledge on niche academic topics (particularly impedance spectroscopy), with consistently ~3000…
Original post at Twitter here Two more excellent Li-S battery papers from @yuchuan_chien published in as many days!