Materials Design and Engineering in Battery Technology Innovations
Patrick Conlin,1 Matthew Bergschneider,1 Taesoon Hwang,1,2 Hyungjun Kim,2 Maenghyo Cho,2 Kyeongjae Cho1
1Department of Materials Science and Engineering, The University of Texas at Dallas, USA
2Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, Republic of Ko
EXTENDED ABSTRACT: The global battery production in 1990 was 200,000 MWh which was practically all lead acid batteries, and it has grown to 650,000 MWh (450,000 MWh lead acid batteries) in 2019. The additional growth of 200,000 MWh during 1990-2019 is due to the rapid expansion of Li ion battery production (at the rate of 25% per year during 2010-2019). Even though the produced capacity of Li ion battery (LIB) is less than half of lead acid battery in 2019, its market size ($45B) has surpassed the lead acid battery market size ($40B). The rapid growth of LIB production is expected to continue during 2021-2030 as illustrated by the recent announcements of GM/LG Chem battery facility in Tennessee and VW battery facilities in Europe. Another emerging commercial battery technology is the Li solid state batteries which are expected to be available for EV applications in later 2020s as predicted by QuantumScape, Toyota and Samsung SDI. Along with these expansion of LIB production and solid state battery commercialization, large scale energy storage demands are also rapidly increasing, driven by the increasing renewable energy generation by solar and wind farms. Recent projections of the global energy trends by the US National Academies require to replace the currently growing fossil fuel consumption by renewable energy sources (mainly solar and wind) 30% in 2030 and 50% in 2040. The intermittent and seasonal nature of solar/wind energy generation will require unusually large scale energy storage capacity and also long durations of 4-10 hours or longer. The global energy infrastructure is under rapid transition away from the fossil fuel economy toward renewable energy economy, and there are multiple challenges and opportunities for the current and emerging energy storage technologies. Current Li ion batteries are improved versions of the 1991 Sony LIB based on graphite anode, organic liquid electrolytes, and LiCoO2 layered oxide cathode. Over the last 30 years, the LiCoO2 cathode has evolved to high capacity cathodes with increasing Ni content replacing Co starting from Li(Ni1/3Co1/3Mn1/3)O2 or NCM111 to NCM433, NCM532, NCM622, NCM721, NCM811, and LiNiO2. NCM811 is already commercialized, and there is not much room to further improve the overall performance of the current LIB technologies. Increasing Ni content in NCM cathodes has made the cathode materials increasingly less stable while the energy density was increasing leading to require active management of battery operations to ensure the battery safety against explosive release of the stored electrochemical energies and fire hazards. The combustible organic liquid electrolytes interaction with unstable cathode is the main source of the safety issue, and the introduction of oxide solid electrolyte (e.g., garnet LLZO at QuantumScape) is expected to remove the safety issues for small and medium scale battery applications. At much large scale energy storage applications for renewable energy generations, Li battery technologies may not be the most promising energy storage technology platform since the small scale edge device battery and EV battery demands are also rapidly increasing. For the large scale energy storage applications, fundamentally different electrochemistry with intrinsic safety is required based on earth-abundant elements to avoid the competing demands of LIBs for mobile and EV battery applications. In this presentations, we will examine the role of atomic scale materials modeling which can facilitate the battery material development and the discovery of new material candidates which will enable the battery technology transition from LIB to solid state batteries and new electrochemical energy storage systems for large scale applications. Specifically, we will discuss the quantum mechanics and molecular dynamics modeling of Ni-rich NCM cathode materials, oxide and sulfide solid electrolytes, and emerging aqueous battery systems based on earth abundant elements.
This work was supported by Samsung GRO, WPM and W300 (L&F), US DOE, and KETEP.
KJ Cho has received his bachelor’s degree (1986) and Master degree (1988) in Physics from the Seoul National University, and PhD (1994) in Physics from MIT. He has worked as a postdoctoral associate (1994-1995) and research scientist (1995-1997) at MIT with a joint appointment at Harvard University during 1995-1996. During 1997-2006, he has worked as an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department (with a courtesy appointment in the Materials Science and Engineering Department) at Stanford University. In 2006, he has joined as a tenured associate professor and is currently working as a full professor in the Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has received Frederich E. Terman Award from the Packard Foundation in 1997, and he was elected as a Fellow in the Institute of Physics in 2004. He was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. He has received Full Professor Research Award, UTD Annual ECS Award (2018). He has published more than 371 journal articles and 45 conference papers (Google Scholar: h-index = 76, total citation = 32,272; SCI: h-index = 65, total citation = 22,775; SCOPUS: h-index = 69, total citation = 24,870).