The goal of that line is to produce about 200,000 cells a year and test the equipment and production process, but it hopes to establish a gigawatt-scale line to speed up EV adoption in the second half of the decade.Ĭook said that the company is looking to deploy its tech in the U.S. Lyten has just opened a pilot lithium-sulfur battery line in San Jose and will be delivering batteries to customers for testing and qualification soon. “We estimate somewhere in the neighborhood of about 10 to 15% of the direct costs of the manufacturing line itself to make minor modifications to handle the lithium-sulfur architecture.” “We’ve been able to develop our lithium-sulfur solution to basically be producible on existing types of manufacturing technology lines, with some very modest modifications,” said CEO and co-founder Dan Cook. Wouldn’t require new EV battery factories Thus, they’ll be able to be fitted into all sorts of applications-including potentially aerospace and last-mile delivery.įurther, it can be made on the same equipment as existing nickel-based cell lines, the firm says. Lyten is also looking into a wide range of form factors already made by big battery players like Panasonic or Samsung SDI, leading with cylindrical cells in a common 18650 format, then including pouch cells and eventually perhaps prismatic. The company also says that it can produce its 3D graphene n a carbon-negative manner at scale while, with all the rest of the battery in consideration it can deliver “a world-leading carbon footprint.” The company says that it can deliver more than twice the energy density of lithium-ion cells, Lyten claims that its chemistry brings a 60% lower carbon footprint versus today’s lithium-ion cells. That, according to Norman, brings the reactivity up by orders of magnitude, and allows the company to tune the materials to the characteristics it needs. To get graphene from a planar sheet of carbon atoms to something useful here, it uses a “patent-protected reactor technology” to convert that planar structure to “three-dimentional carbon shapes and structures”-essentially taking a piece of paper and crumpling it. Secondly, it helps allow greater energy density, simply through the 3D texture. Lyten claims to be “the pioneer of tunable 3D graphene supermaterials,” and the firm says that it’s what makes the lithium-sulfur battery chemistry possible.įor the lithium-ion battery, the graphene helps hold sulfur atoms in place and prevent that shuttling of them as it charges and discharges. Lyten illustrating 3D graphene Why lithium-sulfur might work this time Researchers at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory overcame the issue with “a sulfur-graphene oxide nanocomposite cathode,” but manufacturability there too appeared to get in the way. Other researchers successfully introduced a manganese nanosheet composite to control this undesirable “shuttling” behavior, but that poses manufacturing issues. Looking back, Australian researchers in 2020 reported that they saw the potential to double EV range with lithium-sulfur cells, but they faced issues with a low cycle life. Going back to earlier last decade, experts have been seeing lithium-sulfur battery tech as becoming commercially viable around 2030, and if all goes well Lyten’s tech may be on the leading edge of that. Lithium-sulfur cells have long been seen as a chemistry with strong potential but with real-world barriers around cycle life, or degradation, as well as manufacturability. Lyten is currently quoting a 6% lower carbon footprint in the manufacture of the battery compared to NMC batteries, and it’s working on a plan to lower that towards carbon neutral, according to Keith Norman, Lyten’s chief sustainability officer.
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