WMG Future Batteries | Fully Charged

[Music] here at fully charged there is a lot of talk about electrification but of course that implies the use of batteries and the battery is still fundamentally quite a mysterious thing we learned at school that the point of a battery is to take stored chemical energy and turn it into electrical energy so there must be chemical reactions involved but there's no pipettes and no test tubes and lots of stuff you'd see on a lab bench at school so how does that actually work and not more importantly how is it going to work in the future

and how much better can a battery really get [Music] so we're here on the University of Warwick campus they've just seen some graduating students wandering past but you've got very close ties with industry and so actually what you've got here is the whole chain you've got academic research the pure stuff you've got Applied Research you've got actual industry users coming in or you know right the way through the chain and that that must give you huge advantages in finding out what's going indeed it is fundamental to have if you like input and support and collaboration

between all those different aspects so our industrial partners who set the context and the problems that we need to solve through to the academics you've got that pure science background that grounds the work that we do and we've got this big wmg building behind us tell me a little bit about wng what it does you know the big-picture stuff okay so here at wmg we work with industry to solve problems and at the moment big focus is on energy storage and how we can translate the chemistry's and the battery types that we know today into

something that will basically be usable in the future for automotive for grit storage applications and so on traditionally we've been working with our automotive industrial partner but as the batteries develop and their capabilities improve as I said it's opening up opportunities in other industries so in recent years we've started working in rail in marine in aerospace and in wearable electronics as well on wearable batteries to cope with that what's happening is we're developing new chemistries new types of batteries new battery designs it takes roughly five to eight years for an experimental chemistry to make it

through into the marketplace so we will see lithium-ion chemistries on those derivatives around for a long time to come but over time with these different industries using energy storage we'll start to see all the chemistry types and other flavors if you like of battery technologies appearing in the market [Music] I'm off to meet Alex Roberts who's won the lead engineers here he's going to show me how these batteries are made so this is where it all begins yeah this is a typical graphite material active material you find in the anode for the vast majority lithium

ion batteries I like touching things but I know I'm in a chemistry laboratories is fairly innocuous this is the same materials you'd find them how to be pencil basically it's dug out of the ground purified they always brilliant about that is that you know we're in a very modern laboratory you do lots of things but fundamentally grinding things and polishing thing I mean that's that is those that's what you did some materials 100 years ago but because we live in the physical world yup cent we have to do it now yes I mean this there's

a lot of different ways that you can make some of these materials but the go-to method for a lot of the established chemistry's involves heating up to maybe as high as a thousand 1,200 degrees and then grinding down so you get the different components to react together at very high temperatures and then you need to turn it into a nice fine powder that we can process it into actually making a battery Archer [Music] this machine's next is it yes so this is our reel-to-reel coder so what you have here is what we would call a

reverse common roll setup where we'll take our electrode inks and we'll put them onto a metal foil so as you can see inside there we have a copper foil this is set up ready to coat an anode so this pink it's very rare you see pink metal this is very very high purity very high grade copper which is a nice thing for that's about 12 microns in thickness really yeah it's been a super thin yeah okay that's it the roll will rotate and we will coat a thin layer of ink onto that roll the copper

foil comes in the other direction and we transfer the ink from the roll onto the foil so you've got 12 micron thickness of copper and how thick is the layer of ink on top of that that's one of the places that we can we can vary this depending on the material we're using depending on the final cell that we look at so the rule of thumb is if you want a higher power cell what are the things that you would look at changing is making a thinner coating if you want a higher energy cell you'd

make a much thicker coating and then this thing over here is the last bit is it yes this is where we take our coated electrode foil and put it through a calendar for this calendar it's very similar to an old-fashioned mangle a very precise version where it's got two large steel rollers and they apply pressure under heat across the profile of the foil so when you're squashing its inner or you wash it all thinner and by doing that you increase the density of the material you've just put down so you can get more into the

same volume and you also increase the adhesion between the lathe put down and the foil underneath across the width of an electrode foil will give about three tons per centimeter of compressions a lot of compression that's all these things that say don't put your fingers in it they really mean it really don't want to put your hands anywhere okay so I love about all of this is this combination of extremely fine control and sort of very modern science and fundamentally we are gluing carbon to a piece of copper and putting it through a mangle we

still live in the physical world that's amazing those two things are possible there's a huge amount of background science that goes into it an understanding that goes into it but the processes are quite simple there's a lot of control that goes into there we're gonna go now into a driver so inside there one one thing that batteries really really hate more than anything else is moisture so the place where we assemble the batteries is a dry room environment so normally you know there's water in the air all the time you don't really notice it but

in there there is almost nothing yes we will be the wettest things in there [Music] so we have hallowed material which you saw been coated before you can see on copper and then we match this up with a cathode so this has got a different active material on there we coat it onto a Lamia what we now need to do you stack these up one on top of the other in a very precise way and we need to put a separator material in between the two the separator material stops these two physically short circuiting so

it's electrically insulating but allow is the electrolyte material and the ions in there to pass through it freely what you can see here if I just start it running is it's going to take an anode and a cathode from the back it's like robots there are all these little things moving around but I expected you know sort of nano manufacturing and all of these complicated things and I'm sure that does exist now this is much very plunker thing on top of another thing you see this is what they call a Zed fog arrangement because you

get the Z fold and separating material the machine you see here the stacker is one area where we're looking a lot the next generation it's one area that is a real holdup in manufacturing so what other larger manufacturers have got a lot of know-how and expertise when changing these materials so they go much much faster [Music] so we then hit seal around three sites so you can see we end up with something that looks like a little packet and you end up with what we've called gas bag on the top I know so this area

this area here when we take our electrolyte when we fill it in so the liquid component goes into the battery we then need to do a very slow charge in a very controlled charge and discharge to get the chemistry that happens inside the battery started so all of that gas out there a very controlled environment and then put a final seal on the top so we have something like this now this is a final battery some on the table between us we've got a battery even though it doesn't look much like the sort of batteries

we buy in the shops but this is the crucial part of Technology right so tell us a little bit about what it isn't and how it works okay so this is a lithium ion pouch cell it's an a5 just like paper format cell that you'd find typically one of these in an electric vehicle within these electrodes we have a lot of particles that store lithium they store it reversibly so that when you charge and discharge a battery the lithium ions will move back and forth both electrodes you know this is a chemical reaction and so

ions which are charged atoms or molecules are actually things are physically moving inside this system absolutely yes they move back and forth these electrodes and in the meantime will drive a current and that's what gives you your energy and the way the materials can reversibly accommodate the lithium let's take for example in an anode which is the electrode printed on copper the negative electrode if you have graphite which is still the main material of choice it's a layer layers of carbon atoms and so because to the small ionic radius of the lithium atom it can

fit quite nicely between the graphite sheets and so for every six carbon atoms you can accommodate one looking and then there's one other thing the other thing is the key thing it's electrolyte which is currently a number of organic solvents with a lithium salt dissolved within them which is your source the main source of lithium ions and so and it's important that it's liquid because then things can move absolutely given the how many lithium atoms have to move lithium ions have to move they need to move effortlessly and so certain solvents favor that in terms

of safety developments going forward people are developing non liquid electrolytes so solid electrolytes which will be non flammable and so the challenge there lies in how fast we can move lithium ions through them and that's why there is still the majority are based on solvents because of the speed of lithium ion transfer what needs to get better to make a better battery because the the fundamental drawing hasn't changed but the details have haven't they they have indeed firstly the energy storage systems of Galvani and Volta they weren't reversible so that's the difference and the difference

between lead acid and primary batteries so that that is the major step change difference that occurred became commercialized in the early 1990s through Sony but then now the efficiency we've referred to as the columbic efficiency that's the charge in versus charge out ratio and there are a number of things that happen there initially when you first charge a battery if this is the surface of your materials some of the electrolyte solvent breaks down at low voltages because it's it's it's not as stable so what happens is you get breakdown of some of the solvents and

the lithium salts and you get is what is calling SEI layer which stands for a solid electrolyte interface and that is been researched a lot so you get this extra little layer you go all this nice structure and then once you start running it it gets coated with stuff that's right and there's coating it's beneficial in one respect because it passivates the surface of the materials but it also acts as an irreversible loss of lithium and when you think of lithium being your charge currency when you start to lose it and this continues over time

and this is one of the challenges that leads to inefficiencies in batteries so that's one of the ways batteries can degrade absolutely especially if you're if these active materials are prone to volume expansion then they'll start cracking you get more surface area the more surface area you get more sei you get but also one of the other major physical artifacts within batteries is when you start getting cracking and so you start isolating lithium and that leads to continuous capacity fade which is why you get a limited cycle life on a lot of batteries and that

is the major hurdle to overcome in all from portable devices to vehicles the range needs to be longer therefore the cycle number needs to be longer so with this basic idea you've what you still got a lot of chemistry physics go how much better can it get let's talk about the future a little bit what is a what new things are coming along what advantages do they have what is the future of the battery gonna look like well a lot of people are working on advanced divergences from classic lithium ion metal air batteries have the

potential to deliver a lot of energy but the power density is quite low and so whilst there is a lot of interest in such systems they are still some way of being commercially viable so there are a number of different chemistry's such as lithium sulfur which can hold a lot of energy but their reactants they can be quite unstable within the electrolyte solvents and then these things so for example you know so lithium is a little atom or an ion that can move about but there are other small atoms like sodium and magnesium that's right

how are they going to be leashed well sodium it's not as energetic as lithium so it will it energy density will be somewhat less and it's a slightly larger ion and so the materials it can interact with will be different to lithium but the beautiful thing about sodium iron is that for things that don't require mass reductions I even on mobile things if you can have a big heavy battery that just sits there absolutely and for grid storage for example for load leveling on the grid system if you can have huge banks of sodium iron

cells sitting and merrily cycling away for tens of thousands of cycles because a lot of sodium iron chemistry's are stable and sodium obviously very abundant and cheap and cheap so there is a lot of active research developing sodium ions one of the big questions around new battery technologies which is what you make them from and you know elements like cobalt for example we know that they're in these batteries and they have their problems what what are the options for sorting out that problem okay well in the first branch of lithium ion chemistry's the cathodes are

based on lithium cobalt oxide so transition metal oxide and cobalt has inherent toxicity issues and not terribly straightforward when we come to recycling battery so ways that people are trying to overcome the issues of cobalt is working on different cathode chemistry's so to achieve higher rates of performance within batteries researchers developed lithium ion phosphate and there are other transition metal oxides such as lithium manganese oxide the key is it's always a trade-off with energy density in power but a lot of research groups and industry are looking at alternative cathode chemistry's for this very reason we're

standing next to this thing that looks like an oven except it's a lot shinier than my own what what is going on in here okay so this is where we start to test the batteries that we've either developed or we've had delivered to us batteries are increasing in their power and energy density all the time so when they can handle more and more power it means that they're also generating more and more heat so we have to understand how quickly that heat generated where it's generated and so on so it can inform the thermal management

side of the equation and then the final aspect is the mechanical behavior as well when a cell is charged and discharged it will actually expand and contract quite significantly we have to characterize that behavior as well because that then plays into the mechanical design of your battery module and then ultimately the battery pack the aim of the laboratory here is to charge and discharge those batteries in a very controlled way so where we can safely use the cell and at which point we have to stop either charging or discharging how quickly we can charge and

discharge and how hot or how cold the batteries can be used as a temperature plays a quite an important aspect in the behavior of a battery so you've not just got one of these I mean there's a whole row of them here since this is a scaled-up operation it's lots of batteries tested in lots and lots of different ways and just data flooding in so we've expanded rapidly over the last five or six years the facility we're in now is probably four times the size of the facility that we started with with just adding new

laboratories as we speak so in a couple of weeks we'll have a new what we call aging and degradation laboratory which is probably ten times the size of the laboratory that we're in at the moment there is an insatiable demand for battery testing capability in the industry particularly as we move into the world of new chemistries new applications and so forth we're one of the largest open battery testing facilities in the UK where UK government-funded which means any company within the UK is able to come in and use these facilities and it's the way that

the UK government is trying to drive innovation and new battery manufacturing in the UK and what would you like to see if you you know 10 years down the line what would be the thing that you the problem that you hope is solved what's the thing that you just you know that is the sort of itch you want to scratch it's just a really good question the the work we do here in looking at really three aspects of battery behavior one is the performance better range better energy more power one is safety and the other

is cost and classic engineering compromise you generally at the moment you can't have all of those so you have to decide which of those is your priority but as we improve our knowledge of how to build batteries that costs will reduce me we're using newer materials will improve the range and the performance and also consider the safety so my sort of my dream ticket would be a a achill that will recharge in five to ten minutes give me a 200-mile range and is intrinsically safe [Music] we inadvertently set this up as a market store we're

not actually selling batteries here but we've got examples of different ways of putting things together inside these big battery packs right which is something called the format so tell me about the cases in the industry there are essentially three different flavors or shapes of batteries that the customers and the different industries can use so the first shape is what's known as a cylindrical cell it's a cylinder so that electrode material that you saw being manufactured before it's wound on a bobbin so essentially as I semester off and it's then put into a metal can and

that's probably the traditional battery that most people will be familiar with out so that when if you're going to use those so this this this Tesla battery famously uses so you can see the Tesla battery uses the same format so it's got these small swings it's just stacked up like look you have lots and lots and lots and lots of thousands and thousands of these cells are used within the test so this is one module and there are many of these modules that then form the complete vehicle battery so it's a very sort of brute

force approach we're just gonna put more little batteries let's make a big battery so there are advantages in terms of cost and the availability and that sort of form factor but there are disadvantages as well if you've imagined putting cylinders together in a particular shape sometimes you'll lose money in officience it's not so efficient there are advantages though because the surgical cell itself being a metal camp gives you mechanical strength so your module design has made that little bit simpler so that's one of the other options so if someone comes along to our market stall

doesn't fancy the cylindrical option your pouch is an alternative it's a much bigger battery so one of these cells is equivalent to probably 10 of the cylindrical yeah so it gives us more power more current and being a flatter shape it's much easier to firmly manage so we can get heat in and out of this so it looks much better for stacking it up looks like a sensible shape it's a sensible shape in terms of stacking but from the mechanical perspective this material is quite sort of structurally flimsy so from a mechanical engineering point of

view that engineer has a slightly more difficult test creating a package that will accept these sorts ourselves we've got cylindrical cells and pouch cells and the last thing on our market stall is over here and that's a prismatic cell so a prismatic cell is essentially a sort of a hybrid of those two different types so what we have is a roll of the electrode material so it's wound almost like a cylindrical cell then imagine that being flattened down and then placed into a metallic box effectively this gives you the advantage of being mechanically rigid so

mechanical design is much easier than being flat you can take energy so even inside these we've got battery packs from different cars here but inside they have they've got one of these three there's only three choice so chemically they're identical it's just simply down to the the manufacturers choice or priorities in terms of thermal management power handling mechanical design which might send you in one particular direction towards a surgical cell attack so or a prismatic it's so exciting to see the work that they're doing here and especially to hear about the ideas that coming down

the line for the future it's clearly a place to watch if you enjoy the choice you can support through patreon and the details for that are all in the description below this I'm dr. Helen Chesky thank you for watching [Music]