Issue 24
Week 10-16 June 2019
Welcome to the new edition of our Last Week In Batteries digest!
This weekly digest of developments in the battery space is intended as a demonstration of what one can do with Avogadro One. Avogadro One allows capturing relevant news easily and quickly, saving you valuable time. If you want to know when you can use Avogadro One for your own research, please sign up to our mailing list here. We would also be happy to hear any feedback.
This is a very basic review of last week's events relevant to the battery and fuel cell industries. We do not pretend to be experts in this space but as investors we find such an overview helpful. The digest is intentionally very brief and dry and is intended as a demonstration rather as an end product. We'd love to hear what tools/software/platforms you use to stay abreast of the events in your industries of interest: please answer our anonymous questionnaire.
Semi-liquid battery electrodes
Carnegie Mellon scientists have developed a semi-liquid anode for lithium metal batteries with solid electrolytes, reporting that "they were able to cycle the cell at 10 times higher current density than cells with a solid electrolyte and a traditional lithium foil anode" and that "this cell also had a much longer cycle-life than traditional cells." The researchers believe the same approach will work with potassium and sodium metal batteries and "might be able to be used in grid-scale energy storage."
Impact areas: Lithium, potassium & sodium metal battery safety and durability, grid-scale energy storage
Source: https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2019/june/semiliquid-anode.html
Northvolt secures funding
Finnish battery-making startup has "completed a $1 billion equity capital raise, led by Volkswagen and Goldman Sachs, alongside BMW, Swedish pension fund AMF, insurer Folksam and the IMAS Foundation, part of the IKEA Group." The company intends to begin building a Li-ion battery factory in Finland in August, with production to start in 2021.
Impact areas: Li-ion battery supply chains
Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-06-volkswagen-stake-battery-cell-maker.html
Tungsten-niobium as electrode material
An arXiv paper discusses tungsten and niobium-based "Wadsley-Roth crystallographic shear phases" as electrode materials for lithium-ion batteries.
Impact areas: Li-ion battery performance
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.04192
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