As large-scale investments in the battery sector begin to bear fruit, advances in battery technology are starting to become thinner and charge faster. Enevate from California has been developing silicon anode technology since 2005, and now the company says that they have not only successfully implemented a fast-charging solution for lithium-ion electric vehicle batteries, but also can easily increase energy density.
The anode of a common current type lithium battery is made of graphite. But Enevate's founder and CEO Benjamin Park said that replacing it with silicon, this adjustment can not only increase the energy density of the battery by 25% in an instant, but also achieve ultra-fast charging-but people will have to accept when charging The fact that the battery will swell by 400% will eventually cause the surface of the battery to crack and degrade. Such charging will cause the battery to be scrapped after completing several hundred cycles.
To this, Enevate proposed a solution, which is to use a hard, porous, conductive film, each pore has its own small silicon "balloon" inside. This means that silicon can expand and contract at will without causing any cracking, without causing any cracking problems.
These characteristics can increase the energy density by about 30% on the basis of current-type technology-up to 350 Wh / kg, the ability to charge very fast-can effectively reach the required energy of 400 kilometers in 5 minutes Charge the battery. This is not far from the speed of filling the fuel tank with gasoline. If the infrastructure can be improved, it will become a game changer.
In addition, this battery can also be charged well at temperatures well below freezing, which is difficult for other lithium batteries. Enevate said its electrodes are not affected by lithium deposition, and we know that lithium deposition can cause dangerous dendrites that can cause batteries to short-circuit and catch fire. As a result, they also seem to be safer than the batteries that people use today.
Major companies including LG, Samsung, Mitsubishi, Renault and Nissan have invested $ 111 million in this technology, and Enevate said their batteries are now ready for the big age. Park revealed in an interview that Enevate is designing battery packs for the 2024 and 2025 models to allow its batteries to enter consumer products from major manufacturers. It is unclear for whom or for what purpose they will produce these battery packs, but I believe these investors above may be one of them.