According to foreign media reports, after Tesla Berlin Gigafactory delivered the first Model Y, Musk made a brief but interesting comment on the manganese battery: "I think manganese has potential."
It is understood that Tesla has been exploring the use of more manganese in batteries. For example, at Tesla Battery Day in 2020, Musk said, "it is relatively simple to use 2/3 nickel and 1/3 manganese as cathodes, which will allow us to produce more than 50 per cent more battery capacity with the same amount of nickel."
At present, several research groups of Tesla have published papers on manganese-rich cathode batteries, which offer higher energy density than ferric phosphate batteries and lower potential prices than nickel-rich batteries.
Vico Lithium noted that although electric cars are not equipped with lithium manganate batteries, many of the common electric bicycles on the streets use lithium manganate batteries. For example, many products under the Yadi brand use lithium manganate batteries from Xingheng Battery Company.
In fact, the advantages and disadvantages of lithium manganate batteries are more obvious than ternary lithium batteries. At the end of last year, in the Consumer Proposition of CCTV financial channel, personnel from the Energy Storage Product Inspection Department of the National Center for quality Supervision and Inspection of Light Electric vehicles and batteries conducted two sets of tests with lithium manganate and ternary lithium. One group is the safe use test of lithium battery after entering water, and the other is the deep Discharge test.
The experimental results show that the safety of lithium manganate is much higher than that of the mainstream ternary lithium batteries in the market, no matter in the water intake experiment or in deep Discharge.
This is mainly due to the following two major advantages:
The main results are as follows: 1. from the point of view of the crystal structure, the spinel lithium manganate structure is better than the layered oxide of ternary lithium; in addition, spinel lithium manganate belongs to the cubic system, because of its three-dimensional tunnel structure, lithium ion can be detached from the spinel lattice reversibly without causing the collapse of the structure, so it has excellent rate performance and stability.
2. From the point of view of thermal stability, although the energy density of ternary lithium battery is the highest in the mainstream lithium battery, its sensitivity to temperature is very high. It will decompose at about 200 ℃, intense chemical reaction will occur, and then explosion accident will occur. The synthesis temperature of lithium manganate is at least 700 ℃, and its thermal decomposition temperature is much higher than that of ternary materials.
Therefore, compared with ternary lithium, lithium manganate material itself has very good safety.
In terms of cost, which is of great concern to the industry and consumers, lithium manganate is very rich in raw materials, and the price of lithium manganate is much lower than that of ternary lithium batteries. In addition, the high voltage of lithium manganate battery means that the battery PACK can use fewer cells, showing a volume advantage, and the cost of PACK is significantly lower than that of ternary lithium battery.
However, in terms of fast charging capacity, energy density and cycle life, the performance of manganese batteries is not as good as that of ternary lithium batteries, which may be the key direction for Tesla to tackle key problems.
