The French company NAWA Technologies recently released a new product called Ultra Fast Carbon Electrode, which is based on the vertically arranged carbon nanotube technology used in the company’s supercapacitors, which greatly improves electrical conductivity and thermal conductivity. And ionic conductivity, it can increase the battery power by 10 times, increase the storage capacity by 3 times, and greatly increase the service life of the battery, and can also reduce the charging time to a few minutes.
NAWA claims that this new electrode system will be put on the market in just 12 months, but mass production will have to wait until 2023. NAWA said it can produce multiple types of electrodes for different applications, and these electrodes can also be used with existing or more advanced battery chemistries.
The demands of terminal new energy vehicles for power batteries are mainly in three aspects: energy density, cycle life, and safety performance. Currently, the industry is continuing to carry out a series of battery technology innovations around these three goals.
The traditional conductive agents each form a point, surface or line contact conductive network between the active materials, while the new conductive agents carbon nanotubes and graphene belong to the electrode materials, which form line contact and surface contact conductive networks, respectively. The amount used in the battery is only 1/6-1/2 of the traditional conductive agent, which can effectively increase the proportion of the active material in the pole piece and improve the battery performance.
The current penetration rate of the new conductive agent is still low. In 2018, the penetration rate in the power battery and 3C lithium battery field was only 32% and 18%, and the penetration rate is huge. In the future, the pace of future technological progress in the new conductive agent industry will continue, and product updates and iterations will become a trend. New products are expected to rely on higher cost performance to enjoy technological premiums. Carbon nanotubes are expected to gradually replace carbon black as the mainstream conductive agent for lithium batteries.
By 2023, the global and domestic carbon nanotube conductive paste production values will reach 5.5 billion yuan and 3.7 billion yuan respectively, and the global market will maintain a rapid growth of more than 20% in the next four years.
China's domestic carbon nanotube industry has a high concentration of industry leading companies with advantages in technology research and development and production capacity layout: JSTN Nano Technology Group and GZDS Nano Technology Group. Among them, JSTN is China's largest and the world's second largest carbon nanotube R&D and production company.