Three times the range, can achieve "lightning charge"! Is the emergence of aluminum battery an epoch-making innovation or a "laboratory dream"?

Recently, a piece of hot information about power batteries has been scrubbed in the market: an aluminum ion battery with strong performance has emerged, with energy density and battery life up to three times that of existing batteries, high safety, long life, and better ability to achieve "lightning charge". Almost all the technical pain points of the existing commercial power batteries have been solved.

According to Forbes, Saturnose, an Asian battery development company, plans to launch a solid-state rechargeable aluminum ion battery Ea ²I that uses aluminum and niobium as well as solid electrolytes and a rock salt cathode. This may be the world's first commercial-grade aluminum-ion solid-state battery, which is expected to replace the riskier lithium-ion battery. Saturnose plans to commercialize it in 2022.

It is reported that the energy density of the aluminum ion battery is 1500WhCompL, which is expected to provide 600Wh/kg energy (technologically advanced ternary batteries can currently exceed 200Wh/kg). The company said that a set of 15kW aluminum ion solid-state batteries, weighing 565kg, can provide electric vehicles with a range of 1200 kilometers (several times that of lithium batteries) and support 20000 cycles of charge and discharge, providing a stable life of up to 15 years on the car. The battery not only does not use nickel and cobalt, but also takes an astonishingly short charging time.

Due to the changes in production costs and consumption regions, the global electrolytic aluminum production capacity has been transferred from North America and Europe to China in the past 10 years, with an average annual compound growth rate of 10.81%, far exceeding the global average. If the application of aluminum ion route can be implemented in the technical route of power battery, it will form a stronger support for the fundamentals of aluminum.

However, the focus that the aluminum ion route battery attracts the market most is its performance-to-price ratio. In 2021, the prices of lithium and cobalt, the main energy metals used in ternary and lithium iron phosphate batteries, have skyrocketed due to the influence of new energy vehicles.

According to the latest market price, the tonnage price of lithium metal has been 60 times higher than that of aluminum, and the electrolytic cobalt has reached the 450000 yuan / ton mark. The market is urgently looking for more cost-effective materials.

Technically, the application of aluminum ion battery has a broad prospect. Previously, in 2015, the team of Dai Hongjie, a Chinese chemistry professor at Stanford University, invented the first high-performance aluminum ion batteries and published them in that year's journal Nature. Using the aluminum battery model, the battery charging time was sharply reduced to one minute.

Not only the research results of Stanford University, but also the graphene aluminum ion battery has been further developed by Brisbane graphene manufacturing group (Graphene Manufacturing Group, (GMG), which has "excellent high-rate performance". It has made great progress on the previous research results at Stanford University, and trial production of button batteries began by the end of this year.

Why did this high-profile battery innovation choose aluminum?

Aluminum is abundant and lightweight in the earth's crust and has a higher energy storage capacity than many other metals. When the battery is charged, the aluminum ion returns to the negative electrode, and each ion can exchange three electrons, while the speed limit of lithium ion is only one electron.

Previously, aluminum was difficult to integrate into the battery's electrodes because of its chemical reaction with fiberglass separators, and the researchers designed an interwoven carbon fiber substrate to form a stronger chemical bond with aluminum.

However, the possibility of commercial mass production of aluminum ion batteries by Saturnose is still in doubt.

According to Saturnose, the Ea ²I battery, originally funded by Dana Venture Fund of Saudi Arabia for two rounds of incubation, has been in a state of "confidential development" for the past five years. Only Forbes reports describe it, not on authoritative technology websites. Its website is also relatively crude, filled with a large number of pictures excerpted from research reports. Although it said it would set up its own technology center at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and cooperate with Germany's THM Fraunhofer, everything has not yet been landed.

Whether technological innovation can be realized on a large scale still needs to be tested by the market after its commercialization.