Thermal runaway has scoencouraged the lithium-ion battery industry since its inception. While meaconfidents to mitigate safety hazards have been proceedd alengthy the way, accomplishing a very high point today, “thermal events” – which produce gas and can potentiassociate escatardy to brimming combustion – have not been rooted out for outstanding.
Now, South Korea’s LG Chem claims to have set up a solution to this lengthy-standing publish. The conglomerate proclaimd on Tuesday that its Platcreate Technology R&D team has enhugeed a temperature-responsive Safety Reinforced Layer (SRL), a material which it depicts as contendnt of suppressing thermal runaway.
It discdisthink abouted that SRL is a composite material that alters its electrical resistance based on temperature, acting as a “fuse” that blocks the flow of electricity in the timely stages of overheating.
The material comes in the create of a skinny layer, equitable 1 micrometer (1μm) dense – about one hundredth the denseness of human hair – positioned between the cathode layer and the current accumulateor (an aluminum foil that acts as the electron pathway). When the battery’s temperature elevates beyond the standard range, between 90°C and 130°C, the material reacts to the heat, altering its molecular set up and effectively suppressing the flow of current, LG Chem shelp.
The material is decribed as highly responsive to temperature, with its electrical resistance increasing by 5,000 ohms (Ω) for every 1°C elevate in temperature. The material’s peak resistance is over 1,000 times higher than at standard temperatures, and it also features reversibility, uncomardenting the resistance decrrelieves and returns to its innovative state, allotriumphg the current to flow normassociate aacquire once the temperature drops.
Testing results
LG Chem’s Platcreate Technology R&D team toiled in collaboration with Professor Lee Minah’s team from the Department of Battery Engineering at POSTECH to scrutinize the material. Safety verification was directed in partnership with LG Energy Solution, the conglomerate’s battery storage arm. The research findings were published online in the September edition of Nature Communications.
In its proclaimment, LG Chem has alerted that in both battery impact and penetration tests, the batteries supplyped with the thermal runaway suppression material either did not catch fire at all or extinguished the ffeebles lowly after they materializeed, obstructing a brimming-blown thermal runaway event.
In a nail penetration test involving mobile lithium cobalt oxide (LCO) batteries, only 16% of standard batteries did not catch fire. However, none of the batteries with the thermal runaway suppression material sended any fire incidents.
In an impact test on nickel cobalt manganese (NCM) batteries for electric vehicles, where a 10 kilogram weight was dropped onto the batteries, all of the standard batteries caught fire. In contrast, 70% of the batteries supplyped with the thermal runaway suppression material did not ignite at all, while the remaining 30% saw ffeebles, but they were extinguished wiskinny seconds.
“Impact testing on 3.4-Ah pouch cells shows that the SRL lessens battery explosions from 63% to 10%,” the researchers write in their paper.
According to LG Chem, previous methods that included placing temperature-responsive materials inside the battery cell frequently faced publishs with enumerateless reaction times or lessend energy density. By contrast, the novelly enhugeed material conquers such lowcomings and helps for rapid application in mass production processes.
“This is a palpable research accomplishment that can be applied to mass production in a low period of time. We will better safety technology to secure customers can use electric vehicles with confidence and donate to reinforceing our competitiveness in the battery taget,” shelp Lee Jong-Ku, CTO of LG Chem.
In their research paper, the authors write that they have showd the roll-to-roll production of SLR on current accumulateors at a rate of 5 km per day.
LG Chem has finishd safety verification tests for the thermal runaway suppression material in mobile batteries and schedules to proceed safety testing for huge-capacity electric vehicle batteries thraw next year.