Products You May Like
LionVolt, a battery startup in the Netherlands, is preparing to expand on its patented 3D solid-state battery technology. Supercharged with €15 million ($16.1 million) in new funding, the company plans to use its €30 million ($32.3 million) total reserves to develop its first manufacturing facility devoted to solid-state batteries.
“With great delight, we announce that LionVolt has raised an additional €15 million equity investment over the past few months,” the company posted on LinkedIn last week.
The facility won’t be entirely new. At the end of January, LionVolt finished acquiring AMTE Power, a Scottish battery cell manufacturer. AMTE Power had just declared bankruptcy a month prior, following a decade of producing lithium-ion and sodium-ion EV battery cells. Now that LionVolt owns AMTE Power’s manufacturing site in Thurso, Scotland, LionVolt can set about transforming the facility into an assembly site for solid-state batteries—though a pilot line at Eindhoven’s Brainport Industries Campus (BIC) will allow LionVolt to establish best practices before it ramps up production.
Credit: Chuttersnap/Unsplash
Solid-state batteries use solid electrolytes instead of the liquid electrolytes found in lithium-ion or sodium-ion batteries, making fires or battery explosions less likely. Like most solid-state batteries, LionVolt’s technology contains billions of tiny pillars that separate the battery’s anode and cathode, just as liquid electrolytes do in conventional batteries. These pillars have the advantage of creating maze-like tracks through which ions flow while eliminating the leakage that can occur with liquid electrolytes.
According to LionVolt’s website, the heightened surface area created by these tiny pillars allows for an energy density of 450 watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg). For context, the energy densities in the lithium-ion batteries used in today’s EVs hover between 150 and 300 Wh/kg. LionVolt’s batteries are allegedly half as heavy as the world’s most advanced lithium-ion batteries and can reach a full charge in just 15 minutes.
LionVolt’s site preparations come at a pivotal time for solid-state batteries. Companies from Samsung to Toyota are working on their versions of the technology, with the latter theoretically accommodating a 745-mile EV range. While there’s no guarantee that these experiments will produce market-viable components, any work to alleviate “range anxiety” by increasing a vehicle’s single-charge mileage is bound to impress—and potentially transform—the EV industry.