Thread for new battery breakthrough PR releases

Well lately.. some of this stuff is starting to trickle down.

Sodium Ion is progressing rapidly, some Chinese companies already have 200whrs/kg cells... up from around 120whrs/kg a few years ago.

Many big auto/battery companies are currently doing pilot production of solid state batteries in 2025-2026, planning for full scale in 2026-2028: CATL, LG, Samsung, BYD, VW, Honda, Toyota, BMW, and more.

Solid state is the best candidate for mainstream batteries having 1.5x-3.0x the density of current batteries. And supposedly, much better safety.

As for conventional lithium, we're just getting incremental upgrades.. latest generation cells hit 300whrs/kg.
But as for what you can buy, tabless cells seem pretty hot and we are starting to see availability.. finally, high density cylindrical cells can perform more like RC Lipo :mrgreen:
 
Hillhater said:
3 D printing of dry cathode materials could dramatically reduce battery costs and allow better materials..
Click to expand...
BTW, this isn't exactly new, and I don't know where they got their cost estimates last time.

I remember seeing this early last year, and their last press releases doesn't seem to have been updated since then.

All of their claims are legitimate, but we still didn't get teat cells.
 
Last edited:
I think the Mercedes article states "up to 450 Wh/kg" and currently +25% autonomy, so I would tend to think the battery of the car under test now has around 300 Wh/kg. Or am I over pessimistic ?
 
Here's something very nice for you all :)

Source: International Battery Seminar | March 17-20, 2025 | Orlando, FL

Man, this presentation will be golden:
2:20 Ultrafast Laser Processing of Battery Electrodes for Faster Charging and Improved Electrolyte and Electrode Wetting Ryan Tancin, Staff Scientist, National Renewable Energy Laboratory Ultrafast lasers can be used to create micro-structures in battery electrodes that provide homogeneous wetting and greatly improve high-rate charging. Our cost-analysis simulations using the Battery Performance and Cost model indicate that adoption of ultrafast-laser electrode processing adds minimal additional cell costs, approximately $1.50/kWh. We present a detailed characterization of experimental laser ablation for common battery electrodes, enabling informed choices of laser parameters and accurate predicting of processing throughput.
 

Attachments

  • International-Battery-Seminar-Final-Brochure-2025.pdf
    2.1 MB · Views: 21
Last edited:
The combination of large format (4680) with tabless designs ( with their shorter current path) seems to have better energy density for a given chemistry than other cylindrical designs. More recycle friendly, easier/faster to make, and more electrolyte dense also.

Using a cooling plate on the base (both electrodes on the top) offers better cooling potential than one sided ripple tube coolant setups as well. putting both electrodes on top and laser welding the conductors should ease assembling the pack.

Aluminum cans vs nickle plated steel? Some sources claim that as well, but I can't find a definitive answer. I would be nice to reduce the nickle used in EV batteries.
 
classicalgas said:
The combination of large format (4680) with tabless designs ( with their shorter current path) seems to have better energy density for a given chemistry than other cylindrical designs. More recycle friendly, easier/faster to make, and more electrolyte dense also.
Click to expand...

Much better battery case to internals ratio on those big boys.
And much easier to assemble into an ebike pack.. being 20-30ah, 1P would work for most people!
 
classicalgas said:
The combination of large format (4680) with tabless designs ( with their shorter current path) seems to have better energy density for a given chemistry than other cylindrical designs. More recycle friendly, easier/faster to make, and more electrolyte dense also.

Using a cooling plate on the base (both electrodes on the top) offers better cooling potential than one sided ripple tube coolant setups as well. putting both electrodes on top and laser welding the conductors should ease assembling the pack.

Aluminum cans vs nickle plated steel? Some sources claim that as well, but I can't find a definitive answer. I would be nice to reduce the nickle used in EV batteries.
Click to expand...
Aluminium cans are the best for gravimetric energy density, but not volumetric energy density.

With a steel can, you can build a cell with absurdly thin walls that only titanium can rival, but titanium has such bad electrical and thermal conductivity that you'll never find it in a commercial product.

With an aluminium can, you save a lot of weight, but you need to sacrifice a bit of volume for that weight loss because aluminium has lower mechanical strength than steel.

It's a similar mechanism to why pouch cells can have higher gravimetric energy density numbers: their casings can be super light and thin, but you need a lot of material to keep them mechanically stable.

Packaging bottlenecks are very annoying once you start getting close to the theoritical limit of materials. This is what happened around 2014-2016, where we started getting closer to the limitations of anode and cathode materials.

Edit: Clarified why aluminium is worse than steel for volumetric energy density.
 
Last edited:
JRP3 said:
For similar strength you need a thicker can with aluminum, and that takes up space.
Click to expand...
Evidently with the large 4680 format, you can lose a little volume to case walls and still improve volume/skin ratio over smaller formats. One of the papers I read mentioned specific high stiffness (or maybe tensile strength? ) aluminum alloys with deep draw capabilities..."hyperforgeable alloy "? maybe?

Pop cans are already absurdly thin, after all, that tech is well established.

If I'm remembering correctly, I came across a paper that compared nickle plated steel and aluminum battery cans, and gave the aluminum the win mostly due to thermal advantages. That's one of the advantages to 4680 tabless designs as well...more even heat distribution throughout the battery both in charge and discharge...those nice short and even current paths again

My impression is that the aluminum cans are an experiment as they continue to develop the 4680 manufacturing details.

Here' one paper, a couple years old now...

 
Last edited:
Looking at pop can wall thickness (100 microns) compared to the layers in the "jelly roll" that makes up the guts of a lithium battery, it doesn't seem like can wall thickness should be a big deal.

In the jelly roll sandwich, ready to roll, you have copper foil ( at 6-8 microns) aluminum foil (at about ten microns) and two layers of separator (20-30 microns per layer) If we figure that the electrolyte ads zero thickness (completely absorbed in the separator layer ) then the total thickness of one sandwich will be around 60-70microns...so you couldn't get another wrap even if the can wall were half as thick.

What am I missing here?
 
JRP3 said:
Pop cans are supported by higher internal pressure which battery cells do not have. I am thinking more of structural 4680 cells such as Tesla uses, for non structural use it may not be an issue.
Click to expand...
JRP3 said:
Pop cans are supported by higher internal pressure which battery cells do not have. I am thinking more of structural 4680 cells such as Tesla uses, for non structural use it may not be an issue.
Click to expand...
I can't find data on wall thickness for steel battery cans....what are they like?

Or on internal pressure...I thought that was one of the things that pouch batteries had to deal with, there is some?
 
Nice comparison between BYD Blade technology and Tesla 4680. https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/S2666-3864(25)00052-9

You can see here that to achieve a decent range with LFP you have to combine both CTP design with stacking manufacturing process in prismatic format instead of using cheaper Jelly-roll winding, because you can get slightly better energy density by doing this. Samsung also do this in VDA-PHEV2 prismatic format 72Ah cell for Audi e-tron GT MY2025 facelift, older cells with 60 Ah was using jelly-roll.

But still BYD Blade LFP cell has only 355 Wh/l at the cell level, half of what you can get with modern NMC.
 
Pajda said:
Nice comparison between BYD Blade technology and Tesla 4680. https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/S2666-3864(25)00052-9

You can see here that to achieve a decent range with LFP you have to combine both CTP design with stacking manufacturing process in prismatic format instead of using cheaper Jelly-roll winding, because you can get slightly better energy density by doing this. Samsung also do this in VDA-PHEV2 prismatic format 72Ah cell for Audi e-tron GT MY2025 facelift, older cells with 60 Ah was using jelly-roll.

But still BYD Blade LFP cell has only 355 Wh/l at the cell level, half of what you can get with modern NMC.
Click to expand...
Yeah, it's a great analysis.
It only has one (temporally related) flaw: it analyses a 1st Gen Tesla 4680 cell.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top