01. Advanced Battery Materials

The Slow Pace of Advanced Battery Materials Development

Traditionally, battery research has pursued improved performance through the discovery of new compositions. More recently, there has been growing recognition that particle characteristics such as size, morphology, phase uniformity and others significantly affect the performance of a composition, and that their manipulation offers a supplemental route to boosting performance.

Unfortunately, with currently available methods for synthesizing advanced battery materials, the synthesis conditions generally fix the particle characteristics. Any one set of conditions leads to one set of particle characteristics and one set of performance values. Consequently, a theoretically promising material may fail to meet expectations not through any defect in the composition design, but because the particle attributes are not optimal.

To truly know the upper performance limits of a composition requires systematic exploration of the effect of particle characteristics, However, as long as particle characteristics remain tightly coupled to synthesis conditions, such exploration entails laborious trialing of different synthesis routes or different sets of conditions within a route or both. Researchers forced to rely on such an approach may need years to discover an optimum formulation for a particular application.

How Primet’s Technology Can Accelerate Your R&D Program

Because Primet’s NanoScission™ technology enables a material’s particle features to be created independently of its chemical synthesis, and because the process is so rapid, it unleashes the ability to make hundreds of formulations over a period in which a traditional approach would yield only a few. It is this formulation speed that can be particularly leveraged in the identification, development and optimization of advanced particulate battery materials.

In a battery materials research program incorporating our NanoScission technology,
 

1. Target compositions are created by the most efficient method.
    
2. Each composition is then converted into an array of samples differing in particle size or other particle attributes by subjecting it to Primet’s NanoScission process.

Because all the samples in an array are created from the same lot of material via a single process, the impact of changes in particle properties is isolated.