We included Amprius, which was launched in 2008 as a spin out from Stanford University, on our list of 13 battery startups to watch in 2013. The startup has developed a battery based on research from Stanford’s Yi Cui, and its lithium ion batteries, announced Tuesday, use a nano-structured silicon material for the anode part of the battery.

A battery is made up of an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, with an electrolyte in between. Amprius’ nanostructured material allows the anode to be shrunk fourfold, delivering a fourfold increase in energy density.

Battery energy density is the amount of energy that can be stored in a battery per given volume. Amprius said its initial batteries can deliver 580 and 600 watt hours per liter, and its next-gen batteries can deliver 650 and 700 watt hours per liter. Traditional lithium ion batteries are operating at closer to 400 watt hours per liter.

Another one of the challenges that Amprius said it has overcome when building this battery is that it has had to engineer the silicon to make it stable enough to be charged and discharged repeatedly over time. The more stable the silicon, the longer the life time of the battery. Amprius said the anode can be charged and discharged more than 500 times while retaining 80 percent of the original capacity (a requirement for original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs).

Amprius is supplying its batteries to unnamed smartphone and tablet OEMs and is also working with OEMs to design its batteries in custom ways to fit into new consumer electronics, it said. The next-gen batteries are supposed to go into pilot production later this year.

Amprius has raised at least $25 million from investors including the ones listed above as well as IPV Capital, and Trident Capital. The company has an R&D lab in Sunnyvale, Calif., and an R&D lab and pilot production line in Nanjing, China.

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In order to meet California’s peak load in 2011, CAISO had to secure the equivalent energy of 20 nuclear power plants. This level of energy represents what is needed to serve peak capacity rather than average capacity. On most days, California’s electricity demand ranges between about 23,000 MW and 36,000 MW. In 2011, California demand exceeded 40,000 MW for only 0.8 percent of the year, or about 70 hours total (for reference, California hit an all-time for peak energy usage, reaching a total load of 50,270 MW in July, 2006).

Without transforming the power system to include energy storage and other distributed energy technologies, we have to build and maintain enough power plants to meet peak demand in real-time. Utilities will have to build additional generation assets, leading to increased generation investment while using this capacity for very few hours of the year.

We clearly have a huge opportunity to improve our current electrical power infrastructure since most of our generation capacity is only required a brief percentage of the year.  As the LDC illustrates, satisfying our peak load creates a massive discrepancy between our old generation capacity and asset utilization.  According to the Energy Information Administration, our national capacity factor, or the amount we actually generate vs. the amount we are capable of generating, is at or less than 40 percent. Most hours of the year, a massive fleet of generators sits cold and idle, not providing power to customers or earning revenue for their owners. Even idle, these plants require upgrades and maintenance to stay current.

With the problem of low asset utilization, the more optimal solution may lie on a micro- and not a macro- scale.  Many influential organizations, as varied as the Rocky Mountain Institute and the United States Military, are realizing the promise of smaller scale distributed energy generation and electricity storage as a way to combat the exact discrepancies that the LDC highlights.

This move towards supplementing our power with decentralized capacity has the added benefit of circumventing many of the negative economic and environmental impacts associated with our aging grid. Relying on centralized power systems alone to meet peak load is costly. Power generated from peaking-units (which currently make up around 14 percent of America’s 2,600 total power plants), can cost upwards of $100 more than the typical megawatt-hour.

Additionally, the cost of transmitting energy across an aging grid is increasing and inefficient as well (according to the Department of Energy, around 75 percent of transmission lines and transformers are older than 25 years or older and roughly 60 percent of circuits have been operating for over 30 years, and transmission losses can range from 7-10 percent).  William Pentland of ClearEdge Power points out that “the typical electric utility customer in New York City is charged more for the delivery of an electron than the generation of electron”.

Recent advancements in distributed energy storage technology — including the adoption of lithium-ion batteries similar to those used in electric vehicles as onsite storage — are allowing business owners to dispatch power from the grid at those times that it is most cost-effective to do so.  (Many large automakers, including GM, Chevy and Nissan, are catching on to this potential by developing grid storage units with their used EV batteries.) At Stem we use energy storage systems to provide on-site electricity to customers at times when energy from the grid is more expensive, such as during hot summer days.

It is important to note that even if the cost of energy drops, the LDC problem persists. While many in the energy community are excited by the shale gas revolution, without storage, generators will still need to be sized to meet peak demand and therefore will continue to operate at 40 percent or less capacity factor. Electric utilities and their rate base will still have to pay to build assets that sit idle for most of the year regardless of the mix of energy sources in the future.

Due to their ability to mitigate peak energy usage where it occurs, distributed energy storage systems have the potential to change the way we draw power at peak times. This could, in effect, transform the LDC into a much more efficient rectangle, flattening the load and avoiding generation overbuild.  Distributed energy storage that is implemented as the smart solution will prove that grid stability and grid efficiency no longer have to be treated as mutually exclusive.

Salim Khan is the CEO of Stem, an energy technology company that enables businesses to control their electricity expenses and helps the electrical grid to be more efficient in managing peak usage.

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That’s what a year-and-a-half-old startup called Boulder Ionics is trying to do, according to a profile in MIT Tech Review. The company is developing an electrolyte made of ionic liquids that can function at high temperatures and voltages and is lower cost to make than the more standard way to make ionic liquids.

Such an electrolyte used in a lithium ion battery — like the kind used for both electric cars, cell phones and gadgets — could potentially create a battery that can store ten times as much energy as a traditional lithium ion battery, says the article. Earlier this year Boulder Ionics raised $4.3 million according to a filing.

Other startups are also working on boosting the capacity of the electrolyte, too. Seeo, a startup out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and backed by Khosla Ventures, is working on creating a solid-state battery that uses a dry polymer instead of a liquid for the electrolyte. Sakti3, a startup based in Michigan, is also developing battery cells with a solid-state electrolyte, and says their innovation could double the energy density of a battery compared with existing lithium-ion batteries. Sakti3 is backed by Khosla Ventures, General Motors and Japanese conglomerate Itochu.

Daniel Abraham, a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, told us last year that a variety of researchers are working on additives for liquid electrolytes that could function like vitamins do in our diet, enabling batteries to perform better and live longer by reducing harmful reactions between the electrodes and electrolytes. A startup called Leyden Energy is working on that, and has developed a salt mixture in a liquid electrolyte that has created a high-temperature-tolerant and longer-lasting battery.

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The good news is that handset makers and network vendors are doing plenty to boost the power efficiency of LTE devices, but the bad news is that as 4G technologies evolve, making our phone and tablet connections even faster, their radios will continue to voraciously eat up batteries. The question is can the former trend keep up with the latter.

Why your next LTE phone will be better

The first generation of LTE devices are unquestionable the most sophisticated smartphones and tablets we’ve seen to date in terms of processing power, screen-resolution and OS software. But the approach most vendors were forced to take to the radio was hardly delicate. In most cases an LTE chip was shoehorned into the device, which is hardly a formula for long battery life.

There’s a lot of work that silicon vendors are doing to squeeze better power performance out of those phones. Components that are today separated in the bowels of the phone such as the applications processor and baseband will be combined, allowing them to share power resources. The world’s largest radio chip vendor Qualcomm has released its first integrated Snapdragon processor and LTE radio modem, and according to Qualcomm product management VP Raj Talluri, we’ll see many devices supporting that next-gen chip at Mobile World Congress next week.

Texas Instruments is developing radio chips that require the device to lean less and less on a smartphone’s powerful applications processor to perform basic tasks, such as initiate NFC payments or perform quick GPS-location checks. The longer the apps processor remains dormant the less drain the phone will have on the battery.

Optimizing the network will also be a big source of power savings. As operators move their voice services onto LTE and build out both the coverage and density of their networks, they can offer LTE-only phones (Verizon is targeting its first such device for 2013). The fewer active radios there are sucking at the battery, the longer our phones will sustain charges.

As operators build denser networks, shrinking the size of LTE cells, phones won’t have to boost their transmit power as much to link to the tower. And as coverage improves, phones will stay within LTE’s warm embrace for longer intervals, eliminating the need to constantly negotiate between an operator’s multiple networks.

The tug-of-war in the handset

The big question is whether all of those tweaks and technologies will be enough. Power drain will be an ongoing problem for handset designers and their efforts are complicated by the fact that radios are becoming fundamentally less power efficient even as they become more bandwidth efficient. ABI Research analyst Jim Mielke summed up this way: “The bottom line is the higher the data rate and higher spectral efficiency, the higher the computing requirements — and thus power drain.”

That means future technologies like LTE-Advanced, which promises speeds as high 1 Gbps, will be ravenously hungry for power. Older generation technologies won’t be immune either. As T-Mobile moves to 84 Mbps HSPA+, it will add dual antennas to its devices, which suck down power just like their LTE brethren.

Mielke said some of that power drain is offset by the simple efficiency of its ultra-fast LTE modem  — the faster a device can download a video or file, the sooner it can shut down the data session and de-activate the radio. Theoretically faster download speeds and the LTE radio’s inherent power inefficiency should cancel each other out, but that’s assuming that consumers use LTE phones the same way they use 3G ones. It’s no coincidence that the newest smartphones don’t just have 4G radios, but also larger higher-definition screens and multi-core processors. LTE’s speeds allow the mobile public to do so much more with their handsets, and the tendency is take advantage of that raw power to stream more video, surf more Web pages and download more files – that is until data caps kick in.

Vendors like Motorola are combating the problem by sacrificing design for fatter batteries, as it did with the new Razr Maxx. The short term solution is for device makers to devote more device cost and space to the phone’s lithium-ion footprint. But ultimately battery technology is going to have to improve if the handset industry is going to keep up with advancements in radio technology.

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According to Northwestern’s Professor Harold Kung, the longer-lasting batteries take advantage of two new processes. First, the number of lithium-ion atoms in the battery’s electrode are boosted by using silicon in place of carbon between sheets of graphene in the battery. It sounds complicated, but the gist is this: Silicon works 24 times more efficiently with lithium ions compared to carbon, which is used in traditional batteries.

Second, the research team scored the graphine sheets with microscopic holes, allowing the lithium ions to travel faster within the battery. These techniques improve both the recharge time and density of lithium ions, which equates to longer-lasting batteries with fast recharge times, perhaps as little as 15 minutes. Kung explains the process as having “[T]he best of both worlds. We have much higher energy density because of the silicon, and the sandwiching reduces the capacity loss caused by the silicon expanding and contracting.”

Battery science hasn’t changed all that much as our addiction to go mobile has risen, so the new research is promising. Part of the problem is that technology cycles for components used in smartphones, tablets and laptops are increasing in speed. Hardware is getting faster and more capable while also shrinking in size. But the extra room gained inside devices is often used for more components and features, not bigger batteries that just make the devices heavier — not a desirable aspect.

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What happened? First off, the company’s earnings last Thursday showed a larger loss, at $55.39 million, for the quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago. That was more of a loss than analysts expected. At the same time, A123 Systems reported gross margins of negative 48.2 percent.

Then there was that whole market crash this week, which drove almost every stock down, slightly back up on Tuesday, and then down again on Wednesday. A123 dropped more than most, though. On Monday while the Wilderhill New Energy Global Innovation Index, an index of clean energy stocks, fell 6.8 percent, A123 fell 23 percent to $2.99 that day.

Amidst the stock slump, A123 is trying to give Wall Street more reasons to value its shares and is touting a small growing list of transportation customers. On Thursday A123 announced a production contract with General Motors, but declined to specify what cars GM’s batteries would land in or a volume of cars.

A123 Systems already had a development deal with GM, and famously lost out on GM’s Volt deal to LG Chem back in 2009. At the time GM said that it would continue working with A123 (and other battery makers) “to support several [battery] companies and technologies.” In the earnings call last Thursday A123 execs said that the company had 10 transportation programs in production, and another 10 transportation that A123 had been selected for but had not yet started production.

Will A123 Systems turn around this Summer, or will it become a penny stock, similar to the shabby stake of battery competitor Ener1, which is now trading at $0.75 after it essentially decided to get out of the electric car market.

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Donfang will install the energy storage system at a factory in Hangzhou city, China Zhejiang Province, and will use it to evaluate how to better use energy storage to integrate wind power onto the grid. Wind power is a variable source — it’s only available when wind blows — and it needs energy storage tech to provide needed capacity to level the ups and downs.

In particular in China there’s the problem of something called “Low Voltage Ride Through,” (LVRT). When wind dies down and there’s periods of low voltage, the wind systems disconnect from the grid, and then are slow to reconnect. A123 Systems says its energy storage management systems are uniquely designed to help get generation back up on the grid quickly.

Rob Johnson, A123 System’s VP of energy storage, told me that the pricing of the battery systems are around $1,000 per kilowatt installed. Not exactly cheap when compared to lower end batteries like lead acid batteries. But Johnson says lithium ion batteries, and specifically A123′s, are better suited to integrating wind on the grid, and can provide the short bursts of power and the high life cycle needed.

China could be the largest grid storage market in the world, says Johnson, given its pledge to construct gigawatts of wind and solar power. And A123 Systems hopes its small demo project — its first foray into the country — will turn into a much bigger deal.

In the wake of a slow ramp up of electric vehicles, A123 Systems has increasingly been looking to the power grid for revenues. So far, it has scored several deals with power company AES, including a deal to provide battery storage as grid regulation for a 500 MW power plant in northern Chile.

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But why does this happen? What’s going on in the battery that makes it give up the ghost? The short answer is that damage from extended exposure to high temperatures and a lot of charging and discharging cycles eventually starts to break down the process of the lithium ions traveling back and forth between electrodes.

The longer answer, which will take us through a description of unwanted chemical reactions, corrosion, the threat of high temperatures and other factors affecting performance, begins with an explanation of what happens in a rechargeable lithium-ion battery when everything’s working well.

Lithium-ion battery 101

In a typical lithium-ion battery, we’ll find a cathode, or positive electrode, made out of a lithium-metal oxide, such as lithium cobalt oxide. We’ll also find an anode, or negative electrode, which today is generally graphite. A thin, porous separator keeps the two electrodes apart to prevent electrical shorting. And an electrolyte, made of organic solvents and lithium-based salts, allows for the transport of lithium ions within the cell.

During charging, an electric current forces lithium ions to move from the cathode to the anode. During discharging (in other words, when you use the battery), ions move back to the cathode.

Daniel Abraham, a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory leading research into how lithium-ion cells degrade, compared this process to water in a hydropower system. Moving water uphill requires energy, but it flows downhill very easily. In fact, it delivers (kinetic) energy, said Abraham. Similarly, a lithium cobalt oxide cathode “does not want to give up its lithium,” he said. Like moving water uphill, it requires energy to take lithium atoms out of the oxide and load them into the anode.

During charging, ions are forced between sheets of graphene that make up the anode. But as Abraham put it, “they don’t want to be there. When they get a chance, they’ll move back,” like water flowing downhill. That’s discharging. A long-lasting battery will survive several thousand of these charge-discharge cycles, according to Abraham.

When is a dead battery really dead?

When we talk about “dead” batteries, it’s important to understand two performance metrics: energy and power. For some applications, the rate at which you can get energy out of the battery is very important. That’s power. In electric vehicles, high power enables rapid acceleration and also regenerative braking, in which the battery needs to accept a charge within a couple of seconds.

In cell phones, on the other hand, high power is less important than capacity, or how much energy the battery can hold. Higher-capacity batteries last longer on a single charge.

Over time the battery degrades in a number of ways that can affect both power and capacity until eventually it simply can’t perform its basic functions.

Think of it in terms of another water analogy: Charging a battery is like filling a bucket with water from a tap. The volume of the bucket represents the battery’s energy, or capacity. The rate at which you fill it — turning the tap on full blast or just a trickle — is the power. But time, high temperatures, extensive cycling and other factors end up creating a hole in the bucket (dear Liza, dear Liza . . .).

In the bucket analogy, water leaks out. In a battery, lithium ions are taken away, or “tied down,” said Abraham. Bottom line, they’re prevented from going back and forth between the electrodes. So after a few months, the cell phone that initially required a charge only once every couple of days now needs a charge every day. Then it’s twice a day. Eventually, after too many lithium ions have been tied down, the battery won’t hold enough of a charge to be useful. The bucket will stop holding water.

Why does this happen? Well, in addition to the chemical reactions that we want to happen in the battery, there are also side reactions. Barriers arise that impede the motion of lithium ions. So the electric car that went, say, zero to 60 in 5 seconds off the lot will take 8 seconds after a few years, and maybe 12 seconds after 5 years. “All the energy is still there, but it can’t be delivered fast enough,” said Abraham. The ions run into roadblocks.

What breaks down and why

The active portion of the cathode (the battery’s source of lithium ions) is designed with a particular atomic structure, for stability and performance. When ions are removed, sent over to the anode and then inserted back into the cathode, we ideally want them to return to the same spot, in order to preserve that nice stable crystal structure.

The problem is that the crystal structure can change with each charge and discharge. An ion from apartment A doesn’t necessarily come home but could instead insert herself into apartment B next door. So the ion from apartment B finds her place occupied by this drifter and, not being one for confrontation, decides to take up residence down the hall. And so on.

Gradually these “phase changes” in the material transform the cathode to a new crystal structure with different electrochemical properties. The particular arrangement of atoms, which enabled the desired performance in the first place, has been altered.

In hybrid vehicle batteries, which only need to provide power when the vehicle is accelerating or braking, noted Abraham, these structural changes occur much more slowly than in electric vehicles. This is because only a small fraction of lithium ions in the system move back and forth in any given cycle. As a result, he said, it’s easier for them to return to their original locations.

Problem of corrosion

Degradation can occur in other parts of the battery as well. Each electrode is paired with a current collector, which is basically a piece of metal (typically copper for the anode, aluminum for the cathode) that gathers electrons and moves them to an external circuit. So you have slurry made from an “active” material like lithium cobalt oxide (which is ceramic and not a very good conductor), plus a gluelike binder painted over this piece of metal.

If the binder fails, the coating can peel off the current collector. If the metal corrodes, it can’t move electrons as efficiently.

Corrosion within the battery cell can result from an interaction between the electrolyte and electrodes. The graphite anode is highly “reducing,” which means it gives up electrons easily to the electrolyte. This can produce an unwanted coating on the graphite surface. The cathode, meanwhile, is highly “oxidizing,” which means it easily accepts electrons from the electrolyte, which in some cases can corrode the aluminum current collector or form a coating on the cathode particles, Abraham said.

Too much of a good thing

Graphite — the material commonly used to make an anode — is thermodynamically unstable in an organic electrolyte. What that means is that the very first time our battery is charged, the graphite reacts with the electrolyte. This forms a porous layer (called a solid electrolyte interphase, or SEI) that actually protects the anode from further attacks. This reaction also consumes a little lithium, however. So in an ideal world, we would have that reaction occur once to create the protective layer and then be done with it.

In reality, however, the SEI is a sadly unstable defender. It does a good job of protecting the graphite at room temperature, said Abraham, but at high temperatures or when the battery runs all the way down to zero charge (“deep cycling”), the SEI can partially dissolve into the electrolyte. (At high temperatures, electrolytes also tend to decompose and side reactions accelerate.)

When friendlier conditions return, another protective layer will form, but this will eat up more lithium, giving us the same problem we had with the leaky bucket. We’ll have to recharge our cell phone more often.

Now, as much as we need that SEI to protect the graphite anode, there can be too much of a good thing. If the layer thickens too much, it actually becomes a barrier to the lithium ions, which we want to flow freely back and forth. That affects power performance, which is, as Abraham emphasized, “extremely important” for electric vehicles.

Building better batteries

So what can be done to make our batteries last longer? In the lab, researchers are looking for electrolyte additives to function like vitamins in our diet, enabling the battery to perform better and live longer by reducing harmful reactions between the electrodes and electrolyte, said Abraham. They’re also seeking new, more-stable crystal structures for the electrodes, as well as more-stable binders and electrolytes.

Engineers at battery and electric car companies, meanwhile, are working on the battery pack and thermal management systems to try and keep lithium-ion cells within a constant, healthy temperature range. As consumers, the rest of us can avoid extreme temperatures and deep cycling, and for now keep grumbling about those batteries that always seem to die too soon.

Images courtesy of Argonne National Labs, felixtsao, warrenski, MitchClanky2008, bizmac

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It turns out cell phones and electric cars have more in common than you might think, and technology developed for phones could help pave the way for more powerful electric cars. A prime example of this is that one of the world’s largest carbon and graphite producers, GrafTech International, has begun eying the world of electric vehicles as a new opportunity for materials designed to handle heat in the shrinking confines of gadgets.

From iPhone to EV

GrafTech International, a massive graphite electrode supplier, has been manufacturing flexible graphite materials since the 1960s. In electronics, GrafTech first saw its graphite heat spreaders used in flat panel TVs, and later in laptops and smart phones, including Apple’s iPhone. As Julian Norley, a senior corporate fellow at GrafTech, explained in an interview, “It can take heat from any component and basically spread it out.”

Today, GrafTech is in the process of turning its heat-spreading materials into a component for battery packs that could appear in retrofits of current electric vehicles as early as 2014, and in production EVs sometime after that, according to the company, which also makes carbon and graphite-based materials for applications ranging from solid state lighting and semiconductors to fuel cells and nuclear reactors.

In the electric car space, battery pack manufacturers and systems integrators are GrafTech’s target customers, although as Ian McCallum, manager of GrafTech’s market development group, noted, some automakers (notably General Motors and Tesla Motors) are taking it upon themselves to own their own battery pack technology.

Graphite’s Appeal

Aluminum and copper were the traditional heat spreaders for electronics, said Norley. But graphite, boasting lighter weight and higher thermal conductivity than either metal, has displaced aluminum and copper on “the higher-performance end.”

Yet EV makers and their battery suppliers, “without any other obvious options,” said McCallum, are commonly using “relatively thick aluminum dividers between cells and calling that their thermal solution.” Often, he added, there is also a liquid or air cooling system integrated on top of that.

What graphite-based alternatives can do, at least in theory, is handle the same amount of heat with much less bulk than aluminum (or handle significantly more heat for the same bulk). Based on internal models, Norley said the combined weight of heat spreaders in a typical automotive battery pack could be reduced by about 75 percent when using graphite materials instead of aluminum.

Of course, heat spreaders are but a sliver of the cell. Swapping out aluminum for graphite heat spreaders in a 9-millimeter-thick cell, for example, might make room for 214 cells in a pack where previously only 200 cells would fit. “Not very impressive,” as McCallum put it. “But battery manufacturers would kill for a 7 percent increase in energy density” (packing those 14 extra cells into the space of a 200-cell pack).

Simply swapping out the aluminum for the graphite has its benefits: making it possible to build a battery with the “same cells, but less stuff in the pack,” as GrafTech research scientist Ryan Wayne put it. But what gets Norley and Wayne really excited is the possibility of designing batteries in new ways with these new materials. “Maybe you fit two packs where you could only fit one,” suggested Wayne, or use “a thicker graphite that can handle more heat” for a more powerful pack.

Cost is key

Alex Carter, an analyst with the market research firm Lux Research, agreed that thermal management materials offer a “big opportunity going forward,” since they sit at the intersection of two growth industries: electronics and energy storage.

Yet in a time when batteries still make up as much as 40-50 percent of the total cost of an electric car, said Carter, low-cost aluminum has a distinct advantage. EV makers are “in a phase right now where cost is paramount,” he said.

As the cost of other battery components comes down, Carter predicted, it will create “breathing room” for car companies and battery suppliers to consider investing in higher performance, higher cost materials like graphite heat spreaders.

Sizing up the competition

In addition to GrafTech and other suppliers of engineered graphite, companies like Leyden Energy are already using graphite foil in lithium-ion batteries. And advanced graphite materials are part of a larger trend of “carbon materials coming into their own,” said Carter. Down the road, he added, flexible graphite materials could face stiff competition from graphene (a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon), which Intel is developing for use in heat spreaders for computer chips.

Plus, aluminum producers shouldn’t be expected to stand still. “Alcoa wouldn’t want to lose a major growth market,” said Carter. So as aluminum comes under pressure from new materials, expect higher-performance aluminum alloys to come on the market. That’s what happened in the aerospace segment, said Carter, when carbon fiber began to compete with aluminum.

So far, GrafTech has tested its materials in battery packs for an electric bicycle and an electric motorcycle (the latter in partnership with Ohio State University). The University of Einhoven, another GrafTech partner, is building a 16 kWh lithium-ion pack for racing using all-graphite heat spreading materials. Beyond academia, GrafTech said multiple battery makers are testing its heat spreaders for use in electric vehicle applications.

According to Norley, incumbent technology is the biggest competitor for graphite heat spreaders in electric vehicle applications. Working with graphite would require the understanding of a new material and a new way of doing things in a field where already “everything’s uncomfortably fast,” said McCallum. But then, that’s the same challenge GrafTech faced in consumer electronics, and now we have graphite heat spreaders sandwiched into our phones.

Images courtesy of yellowcloud, GrafTech, Appfire, International Battery, and Leyden Energy.

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