from chemistry to pack
How much energy will a cell hold in 2030, or in 2035? (If you need a refresher on the two measures, see cell energy density.) Most answers to that question start from a target or a press release. This one starts from the cells themselves. We took every cell in our cell database that has … Read more
Every solid-state battery announcement over the past year or so has come with a headline charge time: 15 minutes, 12 minutes, sometimes under 10. Feels like a limbo dance at a bar, getting lower and lower as we all get drunk on the lemonade. Lined up next to each other the claims look almost interchangeable, … Read more
2026 OEM Claims vs. Actual Dates Every major automaker and cell maker working on solid-state batteries has, at some point, put a year on when a real customer will be able to buy a car with one inside. Those years keep moving. This post lines up the current public claims from five of the most … Read more
Every solid-state chemistry roundup mentions that cells need “stack pressure,” usually as a single line in a spec table. What that line means for the person actually designing the pack around the cell: This gets skipped almost everywhere. This is the pack-design follow-on to our cell-level piece on What’s the right stack pressure?, which covers … Read more
Choosing a solvent blend or additive package is fundamentally a search problem: a handful of components, each at a continuous concentration, combine into a space with far more candidate formulations than anyone could test by hand. The Electrolyte Solvent Ratios and Electrolyte Additives pages describe what’s in that space and why each component matters. This … Read more
Lithium dendrites growing through a solid electrolyte do not behave like the diffuse, roughly uniform plating seen at a liquid electrolyte interface. In a polycrystalline ceramic or a cold-pressed sulfide pellet, the microstructure itself dictates where lithium goes: dendrites overwhelmingly nucleate and propagate along grain boundaries rather than through the bulk of individual grains, even … Read more
The reference page on LFP’s cathode-electrolyte interface covers coatings and doping as the two established levers. There is a third, newer one that deserves its own look: treating the CEI itself, or the process that forms it, as the thing being engineered. Three recent papers take genuinely different routes to that same goal, and reading … Read more
Since I know that this is a delicate topic, and many get confused, I will explain very briefly the nomenclature that I used. The IUPAC defines the anode as the electrode at which the oxidation occurs and the cathode as the electrode at which the reduction occurs. Therefore, in a galvanic cell, the negative electrode … Read more
Anode-free lithium batteries take “delete the anode” to its extreme: instead of shipping graphite or a lithium foil, the cell starts with bare copper on the negative side. All the lithium comes from the cathode on first charge and plates itself onto that copper. Removing the graphite host lifts both gravimetric and volumetric energy density, … Read more
AION Engineering INC While silicon (SiOx/SiC/Si) based anodes skyrocket battery capacity, their swelling character reaching up to 300% volume expansion transforms cell design from a purely electrochemical challenge into a brutal mechanical packaging problem. It is not just about how much lithium the active material can store; how the casing structurally resists (its rigidity) when … Read more