Researchers from the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin say they’ve cracked the code to a cobalt-free high-energy lithium-ion battery.
The team reported a new class of cathodes anchored by a nickel content of 89% with manganese and aluminum making up the other key elements.
The key was ensuring the ions of the various metals remained evenly distributed across the crystal structure in the cathode to prevent performance degrades, which have plagued some previous cobalt-free chemistries.
The findings appeared this month in the journal Advanced Materials.
The paper was written by Arumugam Manthiram, a professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Texas Materials Institute, Ph.D. student Steven Lee and Ph.D. graduate Wangda Li.
Researchers say they’ve overcome the short cycle life and poor rate capability problems— typically a trade off with increasing energy density and eliminating cobalt— through a combination of metals and ensuring an even distribution of their ions.
Cathodes can make up roughly half of the materials costs for the entire battery, with cobalt costing around $28,500 per ton, stated the researchers.
“Our goal is to use only abundant and affordable metals to replace cobalt while maintaining the performance and safety,” Li said, “and to leverage industrial synthesis processes that are immediately scalable.”
A number of vehicle OEMs are investigating ways to eliminate cobalt from their batteries.
In May, Mercedes-Benz, a subsidiary of Daimler, announced it was researching ways to design cobalt and other “critical” materials like lithium out of lithium-ion batteries. The German vehicle OEM is looking at a variety of post-lithium-ion batteries— mainly based on manganese.
In April, German vehicle OEM Volkswagen said it was moving to a NMC811 cell format in its electric vehicle battery packs with the “medium to long term” goal of one day producing cobalt free cells.
Back in February, there were reports that EV maker Tesla was in advanced stages of talks to use batteries from CATL that contain no cobalt in cars made at its China plant.
