well thank you um it's always a great pleasure to give
a public lecture like this because the audience is not the order is usually a
professor will be giving talks to this indeed please send a great challenge for
Professor I actually got quite a bit of training in order to uh give a select
public lecture we have a great team right here in select National Lab uh but Michael in the team inviting me
to talk about batteries indeed if you look back about six years ago I gave a
public lecture like this topic I was thinking you know what's really new I can tell you or deeper things I can tell
you indeed in the past um six years
many great things happen well you see electrical car really took off right in
the big way globally so that's a quite a difference right there
and since last year I took on the director position for uh at The pre-core
Institute for energy this allowed me to look at broader
and the energy transformation uh going from fossil fuel to the clean
energy and with even bigger picture what the battery research what can it really
do to impact the society so let me share with you
this first slide and the big picture the global commitment to The Net Zero Net
Zero means a nasal carbon emission by a certain time frame 2050 is Paris
agreement in the U.S is was back to Paris agreement uh these are the major countries the
emitters contribute to the carbon they all committed by certain time uh time frame
and 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies also committed to climate goals
and if you look at this Global commitment energy industry contribute to
some somewhere more than 30 trillion dollars per year
and then looking at where CO2 carbon really come from these two sectors stand
out the most transportation electricity your electrical grid
if you could decarbonize these two you decarbonize
have a little bit more than half of the global economy already so it's
very very important of course other sectors are important as well industry by still making cement making Plastics
these are all important and Agriculture and the building as well
so and to decarbonize these two batteries actually play very important
role and on the top row is the application that's for portable
electrical Transportation right here and also airplanes we don't know how to
do that yet that's why you know people draw two batteries right there it's actually very challenging problem
potential batteries can impact and stationary energy storage to
integrate solar and wind electricity into the electrical grid this intermittent source
of energy electricity this is required to store the energy so it becomes very clear for the modern
society how important the batteries are but when I started 17 years ago as
Stanford I was the only person to work on batteries other than about 1970s we have
senior faculty in the department working on that he retired and then when I 25 in 2005 to launch a
program on battery I didn't know it was so important but nowadays it's
very very clear so let's look at you know what are you looking for for the batteries the
certain parameters you need to Define then you you know what these batteries are good that one are not so good what
are you looking for you are looking for first is how much energy do you store
for a given weight or given volume of the batteries measure using one hour
you you're familiar with kilowatt hour right this is a one hour
and per kilogram or per liter so one is probably magic the other is water magic
for your cell phone you probably don't care about the weight as much it's actually the volume if you are limited
for the car we are limited by both you care about both weight and volume
of course it's also important imagine using how how much per dollar dollar per
kilowatt hour if you have really battery size like store certain energy how much
do you pay lifetime psycho life
cell phone usually you do one charge per day electrical cut maybe you do a charge per
week or couple charges per week uh and then calendar live is how many years this will last
and they are correlated but they are not exactly the same some batteries can have
long cycle life but short calendar life if you just let it sit right there and
wait for a couple of years the battery could die even you don't use it
so charging way is important right we talk about now typically an hour or two
Tesla the uh the fast charge 30 minutes can get you probably about 60 to 80
percent uh if you do get a fast charging in their station
and then safety you care about safety Catching Fires explosion these are the
problems you care about so these are the basic parameters you ask first
and then now let's come back to what exactly how are we going to do innovation
you say well you hear about all kind of battery in the commonweized lithium-i and you heard about lead acid batteries
in the past you notice the nickel metal hydride this nickel cardamom this air
climb bandages all kind of chemistry what's really going on how do you choose why people develop this different set of
chemistry let's look at how you distort electrons first store this electricity well let's come back to very very simple
chemistry what you want to store is electron that's tiny e right there
but they have negative charge if you put two negative charge together they repair
each other and how do you put a lot of them stuck them together not possible
then you say let me balance the charge make it charge neutral you need to put
something that's positive positive trust that's ions
well this could be lithium ions it could be hydrogen ions as proton so to balance
discharge maintain charge neutral so you can store a lot of this together however
what you are paying the price is so big election is very lightweight but iron is
thousands of tons ten thousand times heavier so you are paying a lot to store that
electrons normally you're paying a lot by these ions you also need to have
electrons and ions to store I call it as a host let them all come in to meet get
stall this host can be also very very heavy very big you pay even more
in order to store the electrons I mean the whole game of innovation becomes hey
let's pay as little as possible let's play as little as possible to
store the electrons so what are the choices let's come come back to chemistry well let's first of all let's
use atomic weight I want to pick those very lightweight very small ions so I
pay less so the lightest one is proton it's hydrogen with atomic weight as one
once you use proton oftentimes that technology is called fuel cell technology hydrogen fuel cell
right you use proton for doing that and then if you use lithium-i and now atomic weight 7 is much more heavier but
that's the next plot on the best you can do that's lithium ion batteries then you
say well I want to pick sodium atomic weight 23.
that's a lot heavier that's your sodium ion batteries if you say I want to pick
lead that's really big very heavy one hey
that's your lead acid batteries you use in your car gasoline car to start the engine
that's your lead acid batteries the way you pay is just going high and higher these are all the research now batteries
exists zinc iron zinc metal aluminum magnesium these are all ongoing so
there's a lot of choices but lithium ion is favor and proton fields are in favor let's
look at this other reason other consideration we need to talk about and
what's the maximum voltage per battery cell you can have
what what decide that that's actually in chemistry this term called
electronegativity or Electro positivity the ability of this element they can
keep electrons or giving electrons that ability determined at the end what's the
voltage of your cell so lithium is the one they don't like lights on they like to
give electron a way so the potential is very low they don't want to keep electrons at all eventually you make a
battery cell this used as a negative Electro using lithium metal and then you have a a positive relaxation right there
you can build a high voltage cell up to roughly within this range 4.5
that's the highest one you can find that's why this is favor and you consume electronics and your cell phone because
you need to have high enough wattage to power your transistor power your
semiconductor chips having one cell you say why don't I use multiple cell
connecting in seals you could do that but you pay the penalty you need to pack so many it's not convenient the cost
will be very high so proton even though it's lightweight we know in water it's
limited by the water how stable that is if you put two electrode into the water
right you're going to spray water generally hydrogen usually it's about
1.5 usually so lithium is favor in this case
but when you look at the cause lithium is the highest one right proton from
water is nearly free if you are charged back and forth It's really nearly free
so from the core standpoint lithium is not so good but lithium so far probably occupy the
the battery called my back is about 10 in the past it's less than three percent in the past two three years lithium
price goes Skyrocket and it occupied bigger percentage of the cost right now
so with this consideration and there's a reason why at least in my mouth is dominating it's offering you
this very light element even though it's not as light as hydrogen but it's the next lightest one you can
find least in mind can move very fast um so if you take these material you say
well let's look at the real battery itself right this is typical cylinder cell the size I put it right here is called
18 6 8650 is 80 millimeter in diameter
here 65 millimeter in height this is the
cell Tesla packs 7 000 of these batteries together put into the Tesla
car at the beginning now Tesla go to slightly bigger cell right now but the
idea is similar if you cut it open you're going to see this multi-layer of
this metallic foil a copper foil aluminum foil it comes with materials
it's a polymer layer this blue color is a porous polymer as a separator
simply hope electrical from aluminum electrode prevents shorting and roll
together if you zoom in further just look at this cross section on on top of
copper there is a layer of materials right here this is graphite
graphite is the host materials to host electrons and leave them together to
every six carbon when you do the battery charging electrons and lithium all go to this
graphite particle and get stored right there when you do discharge election will return to the this side and the
lithium will return to this side and forming this lithium carbon oxide oh actually these two materials are the
bases for the initial lithium-ion battery commercialization this is also the
important materials 2019 Nobel Prize was given to lithium-ion batteries and using
the invention of this type of material will really enable that oh and also by the way you happen to sit in this week
for this lecture this is the week of Nobel week since Monday until today you see one Nobel Prize announcement day by
day um so in order to have this all work out you know inside here you see the
separator Legion shuttle back and forth electron coming back and forth during charging discharging
and the fundamental thinking is how you got to move the electrons Elation needs
to be able to travel for one electrode to the other electrode and then go into this particle during charging and
lithium should be able to move from right hand side to the left hand side insert it into this particle
will meet right there right so these are the two basic process got to be
happening you say well isn't that really easy no it's not easy at all for some materials because if you look at
graphite that's easy because graph is very conducting lithium carbon oxide is reasonable also quite conducting but for
some of the exciting materials you want to produce for the Battery Technology they are not
necessarily that conducting you need to understand why they are not conducting how do you make them conducting
and then through this process because lithium relation coming in and out they have volume they have size
they're going to cause strong structural change they're going to cause this particle breathing you know become
bigger smaller during charging discharging this all happen at the same time not only that each of these
particles particularly on the end of the negative Electro side graphite which the
electrons write a very reactive this electron will likely react with this
electrolyte liquid electrolyte soak into these batteries and generally a cell
decomposition compound is particles surface coated by a layer of very very thin coating that is called
solid electrolyte interface we also call it SCI this interface is the gate for
lithium ion going in and coming out this lays very very important if this layer
breaks then electron can leak out well with more electrolyte if this layer
doesn't conduct lithium that much make it harder for lithium to go in it's very
hard for you to charge and discharge your battery so this layer is very very important
so looking at where we are right now all right and those parameters we are
roughly about 250 one hour per kilogram can we double that
gets high and higher energy density we are roughly about 130 dollars per
kilowatt hour in the cell level can we reduce that by multiple times so then
the electrical car will be much cheaper so far the battery pack occupy really big fraction of the cost
and a thousand cycle seven years can we go to ten thousand Cycles 30 years
one to two hours charging usually can we do within 10 minutes very fast charging
then it's almost similar as you know go to the gas station adding gasoline right
that's a few minutes type of feeling and from not safe to completely safe
well these are the questions we want to answer these are the Technologies we would like to develop of
course it's very hard to have everything all together within one technology I
would say if you can make certain parameters reasonable you can improve one parameters in a dramatic way that's
already a breakthrough for the Battery Technology so in today's topic we start
introduction let me share with you these questions I want to provide some answers
to you is how high energy can we go
with the existing uh you know chemistry now
how do we really understand what happened inside the battery I want to present to you a new tool
that can get you to the the level never you've never seen before
and help you to extend the battery life help you to understand the battery safety that's quite electron microscopy
and we have a national facility right here at slang National Lab very powerful
too benefit safety everybody care about I'm going to touch upon that and also risk
energy storage how do you store solar in winning electricity really bad big battery Farm what's the technology
available for you to do that and eventually let's come down come to
the last topic scaling a circular economy because the the whole world is going through Global clean energy
transformation we need to store a lot of clean electricity and the battery pack will be big battery Farm will be big can
we really get there with the resources we have so let's look at the high energy density
one this is where we are right now if we can double
this huge meaning right the driving range of the the battery car roughly
double if we can go to four times of the content not built a one thousand mile
per kilo and the next time I go to Boston I probably will be taking electrical plane
right so this is the impact you can imagine we might have so high energy
dense is very important so how do you increase the energy you store energy e
right here right this is the high school physics equals to voltage multiplied by
charge the skill you want a high voltage batteries you want to stop as as many charges as
possible so that is what you need high voltage store
a lot of charge and you want the lightweight the host material to be lightweight and uh and the volume needs to be small
then you can have high energy density so this is used in the current
Technologies this graphite graphite using Android Lithium-ion batteries this
is uh this carbon atom forming covalent bonding right here this is so-called
graphene layer and this layer stacked together forming graphite right and
lithium coming in still between the graphene layer hiding between the space giving you
these 370 milliamp hour program so battery field has this very strange unit
now not traditional but it's very convenient to use milliamp is current
hour is time current times time if you charge so that's the unit we we use a lot
um but Futures so it is typo right here future and nodes
um silicon can store a lot more 4200 metallic lithium still also very high
so if you can make these two work you can store 10 times of the
current technology so that's very attractive to work on new materials silicon and metallism
on the castle side lithium carbon oxide lithium manganese oxide lithium ion phosphate this this amount of charge
let's say close to the neighborhood of 200 million miles per gram right this has been the power really this has been
a very important material really power your devices you know lithium and phosphate is using electrical a lot
lithium carbon oxide is using your cell phone and the variational lithium carbon oxide now is used a lot in your
electrical car so what if you can make something like sulfur
that could work this offer this gigantic charges stories capacity which is about
also 10 times of use of existing technology and also by the way software
is so low cost it's so abundant this transition metal right here
Cobalt's cause will be too high when you go to scale and you need to think about abundant
material low-cost materials so can we make these new materials to work if we
could this pathway might be possible going from current technology or 251 per
kilo which is a nickel manganese copper oxide right graphite and no MMC this is
MMC if silicon coming in pair with MMS you can get a 400 maybe slightly higher
metallic lithium coming in 500 lithium metal sulfur can we enable 600 to a thousand
while per gallo before my retirement I really like to
take electrical plane from West Coast to the east coast right that's a gym before I retire Michael I still have some time
so so but what are the problems why we
couldn't use those new materials It's really because there's still so
many lithium ions compared to traditional material traditional material hosts they're stable in the
past 30 years we have been using that like Wi-Fi lithium carbon oxide they don't store
them that much lithium they're stable the new materials coming in lithium
coming in right into this new material or just putting all this chemical bonding I go that's crazy when you break these
house materials and then these host atoms silicon just moving around leave it
moving around completely crazy and complete structure change gigantic
volume expansion in the past the old materials all less than 10 percent volume expansion once you have lithium
coming in the new material will go to 100 percent and you could even go higher 400 percent
so much more expansion you need to overcome how do we do that I mean that's
completely crazy to think about it so 2005 I joined in as a faculty it's
good to be a young faculty you are not afraid of anything that's why you want to hire young people into your group because they come in they don't know
enough yet yeah so they say I can do make anything happen I I really need to
have high school still and to get into the field very very soon they're not afraid of anything right that's the best
if you are not afraid of anything the possibilities there to solve the
problem if you're getting to you know too much later in your career you say I've seen
these discussion work that doesn't work so it really doesn't work if you think this way
so silicon let's come back to Silicon silicon can store so much lithium and
because one silicon atom can combine with 4.4 lithium ions six carbon can
only combine with one lithium so some can still store a lot more but
because it's not so much more the one expansion of single silicon particle you put lithium in one expansion to four
times roll it up they're going to break once they break this particle pieces the dead
body they're not connected with each other you cannot get electrons in anymore right you really cannot remember
I told you the first requirement is make sure electrodes can go in if they lose
contact they are not going to be able to go in the Bears will die
the second thing is what is solid electron interface SCI let me emphasize
this parameter again you need to form a stable layer on the surface if this
volume expansion is happening how could you form a stable layer particularly if silicon is breaking
there's no way so the surface of silicon will continue to react is soaked into the liquid
electrolyte continuously react with liquid Electra like decomposed electrolyte the batteries also die fast
because your electric light will dry out you consume lithium so back in 2018 January we published the
first paper that was about two and a half years after joining faculty this was my first batch of graduate student
she's a faculty member at Southern State right now we use this silicon nanowise
structure diameter is very small and and grow this while the bottom they
are in contact with this metallic foil column collector now you can shoot electrons in and out
this is continuous pathway and then you can relax The Strain because volume expansion take place it can break but
once you make it small enough they don't break anymore the pop is the first paper turned out to be this is a paper get me 10U here at
Stanford so this is the paper really you know set the button of starting the whole research field or nano technology
for batteries so it's good to be not afraid of the uh the old problem
um I collably with my colleague Professor Bill Nix a mechanical expert Matt was my early graduate student now a
faculty member in Georgia attack we said let's go to see what happened in this material let's develop a tool we
can see this this is a holder we call it a holder you can insert into
transmission electron microscope then you it transmission electron Microsoft
can have this ability can see your structure down to atomic scale
so if you zoom in right here this is a single nanowire we can connect with a
gold Pro a tiny tip and this lithium carbon oxide that's castle that's anal this ionic liquid
with a lithium salt in there you're building a nanoscale batteries inside electromicoscope then you can charge it
up to see what happened so we can also smartly put some particle right there we can watch the particles as well let me
share with you using a tool like this we can first time visualize you know how the volume expansion take
place how this material will be broken if they're too big so this is a a movie
this is 200 nanometer this is roughly close to about a
thousand times smaller than your hair close to a thousand times
this is 200 nanometer diameter once you put lithium in you see this uh silicon yellow and volume expansion take place
and this silicon White surface is coded by copper
material they are broken by silicon wire this expansion is so powerful you just
cannot stop it and then now let's look at another video These have some silicon particle
attached to the wire this this is also 200 nanometer this one is smaller this
one will be big it's a much bigger one this is 800 nanometer in diameter you're
going to see this big particle just grow bigger and bigger and you see this
interface right here this is a question called This is a morph it's lithium silicon aeroid eventually this particle
just accumulate huge stress it will not be able to you know contain
the stress anymore it's going to be broken once in place
and you lose capacity you lose really a lot of little silicon so we need to
identify what's the critical breaking size how small do you need to make this
structure so they don't break anymore so why small structures will not play because you keep breaking things into
smaller and smaller they've got to be a limit if you are smaller than the smallest structure that lithium can play
they don't blade anymore that's the reason so over the years using wires
and we learn so much I'm not going to bother you the 12th generation of
material design we try to solve interfacial stability problem with today's for today's purpose I will not
be able to go into the detail but let me share with you this is a tough job this is over 15 years of research 12th
generation I'm a little bit of superstitious like I was talking is a good number if I want to do something I
stop at 12 or 9 or 8 or 6 I will not stop at the 13. so this is 12th
generation that's it so all done um so back in 2008
uh when we published silicon noi paper I was contacted by this is Sun Hill Road
all the money are sitting right here right across the street from slack right people come talk come to my office to
talk to me about starting our company I wasn't ready but you know once you talk to people
everybody keeps telling you the same message you kind of start to believe in it
so I start to believe in this and say oh maybe I should start our company so which I did so in 2008 I founded the
empress over what this is now 14 years and
Empress has been doing a great job I think I was also lucky as well I didn't know how hard that was it was good to be
very young right you are not afraid of a failure you just say hey let's do it just go in and do it so MP is producing
very high energy density or bare face right now shipping to a customer uh it's very exciting
a couple of weeks ago amp is actually went for IPO uh but it's a very tough
time to be an IBO market right so Empress went ahead and do it so we went to New York to win the bear and this is
the whole board and also the amazing team I need to say congratulations to the
empress team it's the hard work to make this happen um but what's the lessons I learned
through this process for labs to Market so let me share with you this is the
lessons I learned first of all it's very very hard it costs a lot of money
uh Venture capitalists put in the money but what I learned from 2007 went into
technology was eventually published 2008 January until now
left to Market so what's the bridge you are really Crossing during this process
why it took 14 years so you have to understand in our lab we
are working on this milligram of materials what's milligram right 10 to minus 3 gram or material a tiny amount
and to go to commercial scale you need to go to time scale and then to occupy
big Market you have million times so many orders of magnitude of
difference you know 13 to 15 orders of manage your difference right there and we usually work on the area of
centimeter Square tiny area right to go to commercial scale you go
to meter Square thousand meters square and then a billion meter Square hi many other Humanity also
and also in the lab we we work on this concept this button cell tiny by
centimeter Square any commercial product this is like right you know like this
size regular phone size benefits if you go to electrical transportation that will be much bigger so from Lab
prototype commercial prototype and Manufacturing product right here there's so many technical risks
manufacturing risk what happened right there so this together is all the humanity you
need to cross so this will require you to have a long-term patient long-term support
going from fundamental and applied research to engineering to scale production so luckily in the valley
of the Stanford we have slang National Lab right here very strong fundamental basis across the street Sun Hill right
here there's a Rental Capital money right there you know in the whole village is a lot of talent it's all
co-located right here and to make this happen so not easy
so this first topic I want to share with you now let's look at the second one
well you know let's loot it back to the fundamental research why this is
important you know throughout my battery research I want to find out what happened inside the battery cell
if for most of you you say well you don't do battery research you say battery looks very simple right one
Electro is a reduction reaction the other is oxidation you write down the equation that said
but it's actually very very challenging to understand what happened inside for example
in the bathroom materials are very fragile if you want to go to atomic
scale resolution in order to understand how battery fail would you be able to do
it it also microscopy transmission electron microscopy is a golden tool to see atoms
so I really want to see atoms this is a metallic lithium forming this filamental
structure if you want to zoom in to obtain atomic scale resolution we are
destroying this sample very fast they're not stable
so and it's very very hard this is the reason is you focus the Electron Beam to
look at your your materials there's so much energy dumping onto these materials
it's like having a magnifier right to uh to burn the leaves or burn the ants you
know kids like to do because you focus the sunlight energy right there so we
need a tool for doing that and in 2019
uh so 2017 Nobel Prize was given to uh
these three gentlemen developing cryogenic electromicroscopy this is cryo
em for biology they can study the protein structure
and now we pay we notice this uh technique it's so powerful and staff is
like right here we hire one of the best quite acquire em expert in the world
Professor watu he joining right here to set up a national Center for elect for
cryogenic electromicroscopy I was learning from his research I said well
perhaps I can borrow this tool to study the battery materials because you can
freeze your sample with liquid nitrogen by the way liquid nitrogen is very very
cold I think some of you might be doing experiment before using liquid nitrogen to make ice cream right that tastes
really good that tastes really good but it's very very cold you can stabilize your sample and it's also how do you use
low dose Imaging low dose means hey let's don't use so many Lush and just use very small number of electrons to
look at your sample you can already get the image so you don't destroy your your materials and there's also Imaging
processing and so on so back in 2016 to 2017 I have two of my graduate students
and also by the way we often made fun of these two I say you guys last name is Li that's lithium so to work on lithium
battery so that's a good pair right to to work on this problem so two of them
develop this technique and how do you freeze your sample into liquid nitrogen
very fast and without changing your sample right and then while maintaining very cold
temperature close to liquidation temperature and chance for the sample at
the tip right here insert it into gigantic electron microscope without
exposing air so they did a good job on that and uh and using this technique for
the first time back in 2017 we were able to see this is atomic
atoms of lithiums for this metallic lithium structure for the first time everybody wants to see
that for the past 50 years right because the problem I mentioned to you electron just coming in Destroy This this sample
you will not be able to see it now first time we can image that not only that a
two like this allow us to answer questions for Boston 30 40 years now remember I keep telling you about the
solid electrolyte interface that really thin little coating on your graphite
particle right silicon surface also have that as well you know what's the atomic
structure of that layer nobody know and there are two hypotheses one say
well on this uh end of surface this thin layer of coating only about maybe about
20 nanometer only but really really thin it's a mosaic model you know it's this
tiny particle lithium oxide lithium fluoride and other things forming this past Mosaic patterns proposed by some
scientists listen this paper and it is another model structure model
thing is a layer model you have a layer of inorganics on top of that a layer of this Organics
right there forming the bilayers well you might ask the question you say who cares you know what's the structure oh
you do care we actually find out these two different structures will be very different
and affecting your battery charging discharging efficiency the battery life
so using this Quail em Technique we develop we were able to resolve your
synthesis lithium method this is interface this this interfacial layer right there this beautiful inorganic
particle embedded into this green highlight as a green Organics in there this is more like
Mosaic type of model this is under one of the type of organic electrolyte you
know and the whole battery industry each company have the secret electrolyte they will add in some school additive it's
like cooking right you add a little bit of salt add a little bit of pepper you might add
a little bit of secret sauce made your dish taste better nobody knows what you add in that's what the battery industry
has been doing so if you add in a secret sauce containing fluorine right here right I mean this interfacial layer
change this Green Layer on top has this beautiful inorganic lithium oxide coating turn out
to be these solid larger interface this structure give you much better battery performance
compared to the previous one so we are establishing now this correlation of
performance with um uh with the structure
so now let me come to the battery safety this is often very exciting because you
got to see some fire burning right there so and every time talking about safety
this all come up right whether it's from the laptop the phone the car now this is
stationary storage and uh and this keep keeps happening so what's the reason
why lithium my Ambassador keep having fires well the biggest reason is that organic
electrolyte right there is organic that can be burned but how do you make it burn
so this is a bad phase like cancel and end or two elective is a separate for whatever reason happened right here
you cause a shouting there's something going on May your character and not
touch each other will leak electrons through that this will heat up your batteries this
reason might be due to hey you have manufacturing defect yourself it has a floor right there this might be due to
you to over charging that's why you're charging the control system needs to be
really good if you overcharge your batteries you can form this so-called lithium
dendrite for shorting then you or you can also have accident your cell crash
so once you have the shorting this will release a lot of current right a lot of
energy that is many fundamental process taking place without going to the detail you know this just start to heat up
eventually this will start to catch fire and explode
um so how do we solve this problem number one is prevent shorting detect the shouting before it happens
now let me present to you some of the ideas very quickly first idea is um
um there's something going on it is supposed not to be here
um so we invented smart separator this is a Catherine and now the regular
battery separate right here if you have shorting touching these two electrode you'll release energy
you know the better catch fire but can we put something in the middle and the separator if this goes halfway
we can detect it so we invented a new
technology that can detect half shells uh apologize for for this figure and we
also invented another technology we say well what if the shorting really happened it starts to heat up but we
don't want it to be heat up too much we develop a layout coating onto this
current collector that's colon collector and if you zoom in inside this is a
polymer layer with this metallic Nano spy you see spiky thing right there at
room temperature they are conducting if your battery cell heats up this polymer volume expands they're going to expand
will pull this particle open they don't touch each other anymore and this whole thing becomes insulated this becomes a
protecting switch we show that this could protect your batteries from capturing fire
the most recent one is very exciting is come back to the structure again this metallic foil only used in the past
only during the function of you know coding the graphite particle in there doing charging getting the electricity
in taking the electricity out I mean it's not really that smart like only doing this I would say the dumb job
right so why don't we utilize this current collector we've invented a
Twilight coloring collector we put a polymer right here that's polyamide and
embedded TPP molecule this is a fire extinguished molecules into this
polyami and cultivist copper these are still conducting we invent a new type of
a current collector once this battery about to catch fire this poly inmate
will release PPP extinguish the fire let me share with you this video the left
hand side is the regular copper foil column collector made into the battery the right hand side is our triple layer
colon collector let's look at the video now you build a bearfish now you want to
use the fire and try to burn it you're good to see the left hand side it's going to catch fire and continue
burning now let's look at the right hand side
you try to burn it it's actually first of all it's much harder to ignite
the right hand side because the release of TPP even you can burn it and it's going to
sell extinguish after several seconds so the right hand
side is much safer we are hoping to have such a technology to go into the real world very soon to uh enhance the
battery safety so the remaining of minutes let me not share with you a very exciting topic on
Whiskey energy stories this has been a problem we've been thinking about try to
invent a new technology for a long time it's it's indeed very very hard the reason is to go to brisket it's a
gigantic storage unit right there and then the grids require you to go to
smooth out the green made the electrical very stable for minutes to minute energy storage from hour to hour day-to-day
week-to-week month to month seasonal eventually for example in the summer time you generate a lot of
solar electricity but winter time you don't have that much then you need to store the Summer Electricity wait until
winter and then release it so every year you only use that battery for one to two
cycles then the discovery course got to be really low right so far we are 130
dollars per kilowatt hour eventually we need to go below this number we don't know how to do it
and we don't even know how to do day-to-day that well by now we probably know how to do four hours
and also you want very long life you invest such a big you know a battery
Farm if you only use for 10 years now economy is not good you really want it
30 years or longer one day per cycle it requires 11 000 cycle if you want to do
three cycle per day it's going to be 30 000 Cycles or longer
you need very long cycle life batteries right there you want it to be maintenance free at all climates solar
is usually in a very hot weather right wind is very cold lithium ion battery
will not do well I think I believe some most of you have been skiing and like Tahoe
take yourself and with you and see what happened automatically turn off it's too cold the cell phone will not work
anymore it's because of batteries right there so extreme heat and cold can you invent
a biopsy can do that needs to be very safe so well five years ago we look into this
problem he say well what's the longest lifetime battery Capital chemistry ever
invented in human history what's the longest life end of chemistry ever invented in chemistry let's marry these
two together if they have not seen each other yet let's Force the marriage and see whether that can happen
will turn out to be nickel hydroxide become nickel oxyhydroxide is the
longest lifetime cathode chemistry one of them one of the few ever invented
for the annual side is water become hydrogen hydrogen become water that's the longest lifetime
so I was talking to my students poster I say hey let's Force this tool to get married
to produce you write the equation it's beautiful you know balanced equation that sounds like it should work so it
did work so we produce this material this is a tank this is the kind of the
Rolling similar as the cylinder cell I tell you before if you zoom in this is the capital separator right here this is
your handle which is catalyst to catalyze hydrogen become water
well when we invented this I was very excited but turned out to be no I was not the first one
and 30 40 years ago in aviation industry NASA has been using this chemistry
for Harbor telescope for 30 years now I just didn't know about it
but NASA's version was too expensive they use platinum as the Catalyst right
here our contribution is put down very low cost calculator replace Platinum now it
can be for a civilian use so we made this Excel and we show this
can last forever this is ten thousand cycle after that you still have 95 capacity retention
this can go more more than 30 000 cycle more than 30 years this is again a tiny
cell we do in the left centimeter square a type of level right and we will need to go bigger to go to uh the real world
and not only that we notice nickel the price is not the lowest one we have
manganese lead and iron this much much lower cost come back to the very early
style I was telling you installing energy is about finding
that uh you know a metal ion can balance the charge and we we care about the
cause for the very big system so you look at this manganese of low cost we actually invented for the first
time or manganese hydrogen gas batteries here is a manganese two plus can become
manganese dioxide back and forth this is hydrogen become proton back and forth this is overall reaction without going
for detail well this is a chemistry really worth looking at for for the long
term this is going to join a very low cost balance chemistry so with this invention this family of
using metal with hydrogen two and a half years ago I spent now in the vanilla
company the building this gigantic battery cell with four inch diameter one
foot tall and really showing these amazing performance zero accidents can store energy across
multiple hours zero maintenance can go down to very low temperature very high temperature
and and you know what in a van you just shift the first product out to customer about months ago and just announced a
purchase order from a major green Energy company of 250 megawatt hour
so I'm so happy to see this is a shipping container going out uh so this
is coming up big now talking about big the last topic is
very important let's let's imagine how big is Big right
this whole this whole Market how much do you need uh let me give you some number this is a
portable applications I roughly estimate we need about 100
kilowatt hour for this mobile applications for stationary was roughly need 200 in order
to go to carbon neutral transformation going to Net Zero total is about 300
kilowatt hour well what does this mean 300 kilowatt hour let me give you a calibration
lithium ion batteries has been commercialized for 30 more than 30 years
now so aggressive building in the past decade now if you come a column
production also count announcement people say they're going to build the
plan to produce Lithium-ion batteries they haven't built yet condos in
pays about one terawatt hour per year we need 300 kilowatt hour how many years do
we need to produce this 300 years we we don't have 300 years to do it
so how much materials how big are these battery pack 300 kilowatt hour roughly
in the Pack level is about 3 billion ton of batteries well
what's three billion ton let's also calibrate ourselves anybody can have a unit to calibrate what's 3 billion ton
right there we have about 7.5 billion people in the world having all the people's way
together let's take a guess what's the weight this is my colleague that would like to
use to calibrate people say billion times what does it mean it's only about 0.5
billion tons of human being the whole world adding together this is much more
heavier so how much material do we need to produce these are the challenges we need to face
scale production in order to produce this 300 kilowatt hour
and we need to scale up 10 to 30 terawatt hour production so the whole world production need to go
10 times 30 times more and we don't have enough materials for
doing that we need lithium we need copper we need nickel copper manganese we need a lot of
stuff we also need graduate steel that we need high school we need undergrad all coming
in right this is this huge industry coming up and then we need recycling
and we cannot afford to just bury these berries anymore got to be recycled circular economy I don't have a good
answer for doing that but we will need to do that for sure
so with this presenting this biggest challenge I know this is high school student right here you have 60 years
ahead of you so you got time let's look at the summary uh I was
presenting to you the future of the Beatrice how high energy can we go to
possibly I believe we can get to 500 watt per kilo maybe we'll get to a thousand by the
time I retire and we need tools to understand what happened inside the
battery so we can make better batteries we need National Lab we need University
to work together we need long-term investment from the government to do so
the battery safety we need Innovative approach to completely solve that problem for the lithium ion otherwise we
all need to go to aqueous chemistry it's much safer that is really the case for
this nickel hydrogen magnetization a gas battery use Koh solution is aqueous
solution based solution based chemistry scaling a circle economy remember the
number I give to you 300 terawatt hour that's the number we got to think about
for the next 30 Years Mr let me end my talk by thanking uh all
my students and postdocs I have very talented pool of students I think two
three of them are sitting right here right now you have questions they can answer the questions they are the hero
doing all the nice work and the funding agency from particular Department energy
um slag National Lab is a doe lab theory has been supporting National Labs
supporting University Research for very long term this will continue going
we start our stop I will be happy to ask any questions you have particularly from the very young students right here thank
you very much
so you thank you very much it's a really Visionary talk
and we do have time for questions I apologize to those people who are viewing us remotely the questions will
be just from people in this room so here's the deal raise your hand if you have a question
the thing in front of you is a microphone just to tap the little button in front of you when I call on you to
speak it'll uh the microphone will turn red and you're on please two people
don't use the microphone at the same time it gets confusing so who would like to ask a question
okay it's one all the way at the back ah please okay thank you very much I picked
me first to ask a question yeah a couple days ago just read the article that mentioned about the metal hazards is
very hard to transport because the unstable and now you just mentioned that I think on one slide and there's a
company give the solution is that right to transport metal hydrogen
oh um if I understand your question why it's really about transporting hydrogen
that's hard um so this metal hydrogen batteries when
they are made there's no hydrogen in them yeah it's all water then when you build a batteries you know
put in the pack right there in a stationary store is the first time you use it you charge it up the hydrogen
starts to show up uh that's probably what you refer to is transport hydrogen
is very hard but we are not transporting the hydrogen we are transferring the batteries
without hydrogen in it because it is in the discharge state okay thank you yeah
next please yes hi professor great uh great great talk
thank you it's really stimulating um for your dream of flying to Boston which
doesn't really sound like a great dream to be honest I mean we
um what is it what's the energy density of something like kerosene compared to the
battery energy densities you talk about Target a thousand watt hour kilograms how does that compare with hydrocarbons
hydrocarbon is much higher that's for sure much much higher um but you can see the hydrocarbon alone
that's much higher but once you compare the whole system you need to burn
hydrocarbon you need to deal with all the exhaust eventually hydrocarbons
still much higher the whole system level that's why you are more looking into high 2000 watts per kilo you know 2 500
watts per kilo for the whole system level or hydrocarbon for the benefit one
if you can get to A Thousand Mile per kilogram of energy density and the
continent airplane it's possible but the long distance
caused the ocean one will still be too high and this is not sufficient
so now you ask the question why don't why do we care about the battery so far
away so this short distance one will happen first for the for the airplane for the long distance one this
alternative solution I don't mean battery will be the solution for the long distance one and stand for right
here I can see the renewable field will be the approach
for the airplane that has a much higher chance to get to uh its carbon neutral
but still can do long distance so we might we need multi-approach going right
now uh for me I would just love to push the limit and see how far I can go for the batteries oh by the way I work on
renewable field as well so as a backup you see maybe you can fly to San Diego
in an electric plane that's that's I think that's possible yeah
okay please yes hi professor um
sorry I have a really limited knowledge of batteries so if I say anything don't
worry but um completely fine I'm sorry I remember you mentioning
um that batteries um they have like a hard time resisting
extreme weather uh extreme temperatures like cold or or hot so what is if if
there are some possible ways what are some ways that they would be able to
resist that yeah that's a good question um the lithium ions uh if you go to two
cold temperatures my battery has this organic electrolyte right because of low temperature it becomes viscous events
you can get Frozen once you get Frozen it doesn't work and even if it doesn't get Frozen if
it's too whiskers lithium ion can not move fast enough that also doesn't work if you go to
higher temperature and higher temperature and you know this
organic solvent have certain vapor pressure start to become Vapor not maybe
before that is a side chemical reaction starts to kick in between the organic electrolyte and your care so this very
complex chemical pathway will limit this also high temperature range of course
then you say why don't we invent new type of solve an electrolyte to solve that problem actually that's an exciting
research Direction many scientists are doing that uh that's all legitimate so
far we haven't got there yet but it's some promising data showing a particular low temperature one
I see there's some good stuff high temperature but also some good stuff but having both low and high temperature all
together is much harder that's an active Direction maybe you are in high school right now
uh that that could be something you should think about
another uh someone else please in front yes you
oh thank you very much um a Mr tree I have a question and I think several countries now they focus
on the Breakthrough of nuclear fusion reaction Technologies and I think that's
probably the ultimate technology to produce uh endless clean new energy and
of course and your lecture here today is mainly focus on a chemistry technology
new materials and no matter what in the future still need the new material to
hold the reaction of that nuclear fusion reaction I think that's probably also going to be a bottleneck so I want to
ask what's your vision about this two technologies I mean chemistry and also physics
to like a human being get like almost a free and clean and endless and the fiber
um clear energy thank you amazing question so today I
only talk about batteries I have another set of slides put down my director had as a prequel Institute for energy
I have a wish list top 10 technology we need nuclear fusion is one of them but I
don't work on Fusion but I recognize so important if we can get Fusion to work amazing so Fusion every time I talk to
my colleague Steve chubby always say it's 30 years away maybe now it's 25 years away but somewhere close to 30
years away highly supported people should work on future let's do that you know we can create
another sun right so artificial sun that would be amazing so this top 10 technology these other
things takes longer conversation I can share but I do have that slight India just gave a talk in the afternoon in San
Francisco just mentioned that so that's a simple version of answer to you that doesn't mean batteries will do will
solve everything no benefit will not be able to do that and we need many other
technology coming in I have my top 10 list yeah okay thank you Professor tree yeah okay there was one more question
here yes please uh good talk and especially on safety my
questions that you have shown all the M3 on the safety did you get a chance to look at
the various uh toxicity components and coming out of that and also my second
question is that at the end of life of any of these Technologies how do you handle recycling because you
cannot recycle 100 percent yeah um so the uh the file uh indeed when we
picked that TPP molecules and there's a number of choices you could have for the fire extinguisher we
are picking the one that's most environmental friendly I agree with you this other very nasty fire extinguisher
TPP is considered relatively same but I wouldn't say I
fully understand its environmental impact yet so I don't because this phosphate right there if it's the
burning is complete it's phosphate seems to be good if we cause some others
compound and this requires you to study I I'm not act completely expert on that
and then you mentioned the recycling and so far the two type of recycling
method is the dry method you know you're kind of burning Organics away you know burn as much as you can the prior
process as well consider a lot of energy otherwise the web process requires acid or base oftentimes it's acid so those
has a high environmental footprint so I would say people need to have the whole
circular thinking everything they put in everything comes out the gut developed a degree not polluting
the environment so I personally don't work in that area but I will encourage people to look at that carefully and
there's many a startup companies now and in the nation to to work on those problems and I think sooner or later the
uh the circular requirement will need people to reach the
deploy all the technology needed to get to the fully circular uh uh I believe we
do have the technology right there and it's just a matter of deployed and what's the cost
so last question I think sir so you've talked mostly I
uh the grid scale storage so your examples are all sort of chemical
storage mechanisms how would you say that compares to other forms of storage mechanical gravity
other ways to store large amounts of energy that's not sort of chemical so um
the storage Great scale having a different time the requirement minutes to manage
you know how to hour the technology could be very different minute to minute will favor the technology having
virtually infinite number of cycle life but can do this very fast uh back and
forth so that's why flywheel is used sometimes right and simple capacitors could be used that
hour to hours flywheel will be challenging and silver capacitor will be
challenging then the battery will start to kick in and then once you go to day to day probably stay in the battery domain
three days a week I believe about within a week it's probably better it will be
raining then you say going beyond that what's that then the chemical field might start to kick in hydrogen
by month to month storage and it is also Palm hydro pump height is always good
it's just how do you get permit and the total capacity remember we need
300 kilowatt hour I don't think we have that capacity and if you have your sofa
is probably about the global so far is about one kilowatt hour of
storage that's it after so many years of 100 Years of accumulation
uh what's the you know additional capacity you can do you can do gigawatt
hour many gigabyte getting another tele hour might be hard and you say what is also gravity I
respect that you know raising up and down and it all comes down to the cost
at the end maybe my personal opinion is biased because I work on batteries so I
I was just within a week it's probably is the belt is winning it and it's well
it is more than you know metal molten salt can come up to play a role it's all
about the cost so I need to wait and see their course can really get down to I'm looking for the storage solution per
kilowatt hour per cycle is one cent for the long term so let's see what channels
you can get there right and so for all those terminals are still too high cost
okay well thank you very very much for this inspiring lecture thank you
so uh professor schwe and his students will be around for a while out in the hall
so uh please uh we'll meet you in the hall outside this room and we'll those
of you have more questions we can sit around and discuss for a little while so thank you all for coming these
lectures continue probably the next one around Thanksgiving please see the announcement and um lots more
interesting things happen here so I hope you'll come back and hear about them
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