The Argonne scientist team was able to see the success of the layer within the lithium-sulfur cell by using a state-of-the-art X-ray diffraction machine in one of Argonne’s labs. In the lab, Argonne’s lithium-sulfur battery was able to charge and discharge 700 times, which is competitive with today’s lithium-ion batteries. Argonne scientists created a porous sulfur-containing layer within the battery that can help protect the materials from the dendrite destruction. Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have also recently made some progress on the lithium-sulfur battery. Lyten plans to sell the batteries to automakers and manufacturers of drones and flying vehicles. It won’t be in high volumes, but early customers will be able to use it, she said. The company says it’s seen promising results in its trials, and Mikolajczak told GreenBiz in an interview that she expects Lyten to be able to develop "a respectable battery cell" in about a year. Mikolajczak’s company Lyten - an 8-year-old startup based in San Jose, California - can manufacture a crumpled form of graphene that it says is great at essentially holding the sulfur together in the battery while also acting as a conductor. Dendrites cause short-circuiting and battery failure, and lithium-sulfur batteries have had trouble maintaining high charging cycles.Īt stake is technology that could potentially accelerate both EVs and storing clean energy. Many attempts to develop lithium-sulfur batteries have ended up with low-functioning batteries that develop dendrites, tiny metallic structures that can form during the charging process. It makes your head explode."Įarly attempts at lithium-sulfur batteries saw the sulfur compound dissolve into the electrolyte, the medium (usually liquid) through which the ions charge and discharge. That makes it really "fussy," said Mikolajczak. It moves from a solid to a liquid and back to a solid again. One problem is that sulfur, used as the cathode of the lithium-sulfur battery, goes through a phase change as it’s charged and discharged. "There’s a reason this chemistry hasn’t been exploited for a long time." ![]() When you put these two elements together you get a chemistry that is really difficult to work with," said Mikolajczak at the BNEF summit. While startups, researchers and big battery companies are working on the chemistry, no lithium-sulfur batteries are commercially manufactured at scale. ![]() The big question is whether a company can develop and manufacture a lithium-sulfur battery to work as advertised when made in large volumes. At stake is technology that could potentially accelerate both EVs and storing clean energy. battery sector from the Inflation Reduction Act, companies and scientists are scrambling to crack the code to develop a breakthrough battery that could be next in line after lithium ion. Lithium-sulfur batteries are still confined to the research labs.īut as money flows into an emerging U.S. Today’s EVs can drive about 300 miles per charge, but a lithium-sulfur battery could potentially double that range - or create an EV that’s half the weight of the lithium-ion-powered equivalent.Īt least these are the big hopes. The idea is that sulfur’s abundance and low cost could make a lithium-sulfur battery far cheaper, and less dependent on problematic regions, than the current lithium-ion battery pack, which costs around $150 per kilowatt-hour.Īt the same time, the use of sulfur in a battery could provide a theoretical super high energy density, or amount of energy that the battery can hold on a single charge. Cobalt, another key ingredient in today’s lithium-ion batteries, is largely mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the cobalt mines are plagued with human rights issues. ![]() Lyten is developing a lithium-sulfur battery.Ĭurrent lithium-ion batteries are hampered by the constrained supply of nickel. That’s because the combination of lithium and sulfur has the potential to make an extraordinary battery that could both store more energy and be made more cheaply than the lithium-ion batteries used today in laptops and electric vehicles.Ī commercial lithium-sulfur battery could make "electrification something that is abundant," where "it’s easy to electrify everything," said Celina Mikolajczak, chief battery technology officer of startup Lyten, at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit in San Francisco in January. There‘s so much of it on Earth that big yellow piles of the stuff commonly sit outside of fossil fuel refineries after it’s been stripped of oil and natural gas.īut electrochemists - scientists who research how chemical reactions create electricity - have long seen sulfur as a tantalizing prospect for incredible energy storage. The element sulfur is cheap and plentiful.
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