James Snodgrass interviewed some of the participants at the Advanced Automotive Battery Conference (AABC) in Mainz, Germany, in May, to learn about the unique technologies they are bringing to the battery party

Testing times

Tom Cleaver, CEO, Cognition Energy

At Cognition Energy, we do two things: we carry out cell testing as a service, and we design and manufacture the cell holders and test fixtures needed to do that testing properly.

When you test a cell, you need to contact it electrically, control its temperature and, in many cases, apply compression. That means building a jig around the cell. We make those jigs, either as individual holders or as complete systems that slot into thermal chambers. Customers can use our test facility, or if they have their own lab, we can supply the equipment.

The challenge is that no two cell formats are quite the same. Coin cells, cylindrical cells, pouch cells, prismatic cells and blade cells all have different geometries. Some sizes, such as 18650, 21700 and 4680 cylindrical cells, are well known, but pouch and prismatic formats vary enormously because manufacturers design them around the product they want
to build.

That is why the fixtures matter. You have to touch the terminals safely and consistently, and for pouch cells you usually need to apply even pressure across the cell. If you press unevenly, you can damage it. So we use aluminium or steel plates, springs and carefully designed mechanisms to apply the right compression. Once the cell is set up, you can click it into the test system and start.

We prototype and do low-volume production in-house, including CNC machining and assembly. For higher-volume work, we use local UK suppliers, including specialist machinists, PCB suppliers, 3D printing companies and injection moulders. We then assemble, test and ship the systems from our site.

We are based at Milton Hill, just outside Abingdon, south of Oxford. It is a lovely site on a former fruit farm, with cows, sheep and a cherry orchard nearby. It also has something very useful: a large electrical connection. The site used to have cold stores, which needed big chillers. We now use that electrical capacity for battery testing. Some customer tests take a week, some take two years.

Cognition was founded in 2018. We originally planned to be a battery company, building packs with a Cognition badge on them. But we realised many others were doing that, and that buying a battery pack from a large established supplier often made more sense. What we did have was a lot of test capability, because we had been trying to do things properly: selecting cells, tuning battery management systems and extending life as far as possible.

That led us into cell testing. Then, because we were constantly making holders for our own work, customers began asking whether they could buy them. We launched the cell holder products about a year ago, and we are already making them in the thousands.

My own background is in electronic engineering, although I quickly realised I did not want to spend my life doing that. I went to Sandhurst [The British Army’s Royal Military Academy], but my ankle objected, so I moved into the defence industry and then into batteries in 2012, spending five years at Oxis Energy working on lithium-sulphur technology. I started Cognition after automotive chief engineers began asking me for battery advice.

We founded the company with academics from Imperial College London, including Greg Offer, Yatish Patel and Peter Corby. Imperial has been extraordinarily good at spinning out battery companies. It understood that, to compete with Stanford, MIT and Caltech, it had to encourage students and academics to build companies.

We have grown organically, rather than through venture capital. Services are not usually what VCs want to fund, and our advantage has been practical engineering rather than a single patent. Customers buy what we make, and we reinvest that money into growth. We now have around 16 or 17 people, a large test facility and a manufacturing operation in Oxfordshire.

For me, the point is simple. Highly skilled people should not be wasting days fiddling inside thermal chambers with crocodile clips, bits of nickel and head torches. They should be using their brain power to understand cells, improve batteries and accelerate the energy transition. Our job is to remove the painful, unsafe, inefficient parts of testing and make the process faster, cleaner and therefore more repeatable.

Screenprinting batteries

Gwen Sandberg, chief commercial officer, Holyvolt

I am based in Stockholm, where Holyvolt has its European headquarters and leadership team. My own background is not originally in batteries. I come from tech, including Google, finance, startups and scale-ups. Most recently, I was in venture capital, meeting and evaluating startups from across the Nordics.

In VC, you see a lot of companies that are essentially variations on the same idea. They are going to be the Amazon Web Services for this industry or that industry. Then I met Holyvolt and its founder, Mathias, and immediately recognised that this was something different.

There are a few things you look for as an investor. First, a founder who can take punches and keep coming back. Second, a massive industry. Third, an innovative approach that only an outsider would come up with, because someone inside the industry might think it was too crazy to work.

Holyvolt’s approach is screen printing energy systems. That can mean heaters, solar cells and, in our case, battery cells. I invested, and when Holyvolt raised its Series A two years ago, I joined as chief commercial officer to help build the commercial organisation. At this stage of a company, things pivot, go left and go right, so you need agile people who understand what a Series A company needs. You hire people smarter than you, who know the industry, and then you let it run.

The simplest way to think about the technology is as a screen printer, like a T-shirt printer, with a mesh and a squeegee. People have tested screen printing batteries before, but there were problems, including aligning the different layers perfectly. As with printing several colours on a shirt, the registration has to be exact.

Our view was that the issue was in the substance being printed. We needed a material that could deliver results comparable with slot-die coated battery cells, but that was viscous enough to work through the meshes and align properly once printed.

Christian Jung, who heads our battery department and has worked with automotive OEMs including Porsche, suggested working with Wildcat Discovery Technologies, a company he knew was very strong in battery chemistry. We ran a four-month sprint and went from nothing to a screen-printed battery that performed as well as a slot-die coated cell using water-based NMC material.

We were so impressed that we began talking more deeply with Wildcat. The company is known for helping organisations across the battery supply chain develop chemistries faster, using high-throughput chemistry.

That means it can test huge numbers of chemical combinations and identify a handful of recipes that may work for a particular application.

Wildcat had also explored other positions in the supply chain, including plans for an LFP manufacturing plant in the US, but that market changed. We proposed acquiring the company, and the acquisition was finalised in February. Since then, we have been aligning our strategies and deciding which opportunities to focus on.

Combined with Wildcat, we now have several options. Screen-printed batteries remain one. Wildcat’s high-throughput data also creates an AI opportunity. To build an AI model, you need terabytes of data, and Wildcat has been automating its testing machinery and collecting data for 18 years, with more than 500,000 tests. That is a highly valuable database.

Another option is DRX, Wildcat’s proprietary cathode material. DRX stands for disordered rock salt. In a conventional lithium battery, the atomic structure is more linear. With DRX, it is more like a three-dimensional network, giving the structure more room to expand when it heats up. That creates potential safety benefits compared with LFP, as well as opportunities around energy density and a more Western-oriented supply chain.

The challenge for us now is focus. Each of these opportunities could almost be a company in itself. Batteries look simple from the outside, but they are incredibly sensitive. Change one material, one supplier or one part of the chemistry, and you can change the whole performance of the battery. That is what makes the field so complex, and also what makes it so interesting.

Preventing manganese dissolution

Guillaume de Forton, director of international business development, Ten-Nine Technologies

I am based in London and work from home, while Ten-Nine Technologies is headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I joined the company at the end of January as international business development director, covering Europe and Asia. My first visit to Tulsa was just after I joined.

Ten-Nine is a developer and manufacturer of cathode additives. Our product is called Tenix. It is a powder, a drop-in material that is added directly into the cathode slurry. Its purpose is to improve cell performance, particularly cycle life, high C-rate performance and charging speed, while also reducing the internal resistance of the cell.

The additive is mainly geared towards manganese-based chemistries, including LMO, LMR and NMC. LMO is lithium manganese oxide, LMR is lithium manganese-rich chemistry, and NMC is nickel manganese cobalt. Today, our customers are cell manufacturers. We are working with, and targeting, major cell producers in markets such as Korea, China, Europe and the US.

We manufacture the additive ourselves. At the moment, we have a batch production process in Tulsa with annual capacity of around 40 tonnes. We are scaling up to a second facility, also in Tulsa, using a continuous production process with capacity of around 1,000 tonnes per year.

Moving from batch to continuous production will allow us to reduce costs, which is important because this is a high-value material.

Customers typically use Tenix at about 1% of the cathode active material slurry, replacing around 1% of the active material. It is added in a very small quantity, but the impact can be significant.

I came to Ten-Nine after reaching out to the company last year. They already had a strong customer base in the US and were looking to expand overseas, particularly in Europe and Asia. The timing was right:
I was looking for a new opportunity, and I could see a clear fit.

I have worked in the battery industry for nearly 15 years. I started at Oxis Energy, the former lithium-sulphur battery developer in Oxford, which went bankrupt in May 2021. I was head of business development for Europe and Asia. I then spent around three and a half years with Freyr Battery, the former Norwegian company that was planning to manufacture LFP cells in northern Norway and later in Georgia in the US, before it moved out of battery cell manufacturing. Last year, I also had a brief spell with Sunwoda, the large Chinese cell and battery pack manufacturer.

Those experiences were focused on cell manufacturing. Ten-Nine is different because it is a materials company. I saw a gap in cell chemistries, where degradation mechanisms and other technical challenges still create real limitations. Ten-Nine offers a practical way to address some of those drawbacks and improve battery performance.

My background is commercial rather than electrochemical. I am not a chemist or an engineer. I have a master’s degree in commercial science, with a major in international business. I am originally from France and have lived in the UK since January 2015.

The value of Tenix is most obvious in manganese-rich chemistries. In LMO and LMR cells, it can increase cycle life by up to four times. That is important because manganese dissolves very quickly in those systems, and our additive helps prevent manganese dissolution. In NMC cathodes, we can increase cycle life by around 30%. That is not a small incremental improvement, it is a significant gain in performance.