What is Inside a Solid State Battery?
Good old days when mercury was considered medicine wireless electricity to power.
Airplanes was a thing and the first let acid batteries ruled the world.
Which funny enough had an energy density of less than 40 watt hour per liter.
Since its invention in 1859 batteries were never a big hit.
They even tried to use it with electric cars at the time but these batteries weren't powerful enough to do anything with it.
It would take 120 years for batteries to get somewhere.
When during the 1970s and 80s lithium-ion technology was in the works by john goodenough, stainle whittingham, rashida asami, and akira yoshino.
But the early lithium batteries were famous for a few problems.
Ranging from losing capacity with a short period of time to bursting into flames.
Let me put it this way, they weren't as reliable as they are today.
In 1991 later lithium-ion batteries started to be commercialized by sony have this technology.
And at this point in time the energy density increased only a little or from about 40 watt hour per liter to about 190.
30 years later and samsung is close to finalizing its research towards an all solid-state battery.
Which delivers an unprecedented 900 watt per liter and a minimum lifetime of a thousand cycles.
Hold on to your lunches my dear viewers because things are about to get interesting.
Lithium is by far the best candidate for high energy density batteries not only is abundant in nature but in theory.
Its energy density of 6,389 watt hours per liter can surpass that off gasoline.
Just to give you an idea the energy density provided by gasoline is at current about 15.8 times more energy dense than batteries or 9500 watt hour per liter.
Compared to living in lithium-ion batteries ranging from 250 to 600.
Of course if you take into account that gasoline combustion cycle, is less efficient.
Such that for every liter you burn, you get at most 40% of that energy.
And then the difference drops to about 6.3 times but let's go with that.
Assuming efficiency to be around 40%, side by side we can easily see why interest in batteries increased so much that if we could reach the full potential of lithium-ion batteries.
The range per charge for model 3 for instance would be multiplied by almost 10 or from 518 kilometers to 5,000 kilometers in one charge.
What it also means is that instead of having 6 to 8,000 batteries.
We could have cars with only 1 to 2,000 batteries with a range of a thousand kilometers.
If not more not only that, but decreasing the number of batteries makes it safer, charge is faster, and is more environmentally friendly.
But that is only possible with solid-state batteries.
And we all know that there are mainly two problems with them.
The first one is dendrites which causes volume expansion ultimately.
Causing the battery to fail or even burst.
Then samsung came with have the local ohmic efficiency, which causes the battery to degrade faster, having a lower life cycle, and let's not even enter the discussion of how complicated it is to work with lithium.
Represents a 50% improvement in terms of energy density, while more than 200% of battery life cycle.
How they achieved this, is fascinating.
Samsung research for an all solid-state battery, their goal was to eliminate dendrites formation and increase columbic efficiency.
To do that they send which layers of lithium nickel cobalt aluminium oxide mixed with a sulfide solid electrolyte on top of a nano composite layer of silver carbon.
All of this is located in between a foil of aluminum and stainless steel as the current collectors.
The idea behind this nmc or the ss this approach diminishes the cost of the overall battery manufacturing.
Since handling lithium usually needs an oxygen-free environment due to its higher reactivity.
This is important for a few reasons in conventional lithium batteries, the anode comprised of lithium moves freely.
Towards the positive electrode during discharge dendrites are formed during the charging process.
This is the main limiting factor of how much energy can be stored in these batteries.
Since to control this, the amount of lithium available in the system has to be kept limiting.
The energy density the sulfide solid electrolyte approach.
Leave him back and forth with a little help from silver in a uniform manner.
Allowing the atom to be deposited in flat layers with little to no chance of dendrites forming nice right.
But samsung took this idea a step further most solid-state battery technologies proposed to date have some sort of nano matrix layer compound like silica for instance.
That is used to absorb lithium ions by removing this layer and having only silver atoms.
Playing the part of the matrix to guide the ions, you can effectively introduce more cathode into the mix.
Increasing the overall energy density of the battery or 900 watt hours per liter.
This approach also increases battery lifetime efficiency by 200%.
In this scenario all lithium in this system is allocated within the nmc molecules.
Comprising the cathode of the system here, there is no anode and the stingless still.
Sheet works as the current collector to drive the reaction.
So the battery is initially in a discharged state.
When the battery is being charged, lithium ions pass through the carbon layer attaching themselves to silver atoms.
This in turn, promotes a better connection of the lithium layer onto the stainless steel current collector.
What you get in the end is a clean sheet of lithium silver free of dendrites.
This cycle can be repeated more than a thousand times flawlessly.
Samsung solved many problems here but one of them stands out and that is the construction of the battery.
By having only the nmc cathode embedded into a solid electrolyte and separated by the nano layer of silver carbon.
It eliminates the need for oxygen free environment.
Necessary for the construction of the battery, ultimately reducing cost.
Although this is a hu