The startup aims to scale the battery up to a palm-sized pouch cell, and then upward toward a full-scale vehicle battery in the next three to five years. Fred Hu, PhD, founder and Chairman of Primavera Capital, is also a founder of Adden Energy. It also boasts high energy density and a level of material stability that overcomes the safety challenges posed by some other lithium batteries.Īdden Energy was co-founded in 2021 by Li, along with William Fitzhugh, PhD, and Luhan Ye, PhD, both of whom contributed to the development of the technology as graduate students in Li’s Harvard lab. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the lab-scale coin-cell prototype has achieved battery charge rates as fast as three minutes with over 10,000 cycles in a lifetime, with results published in Nature and other journals. The license and the venture funding will enable the startup to scale Harvard’s laboratory prototype toward commercial deployment of a solid-state lithium-metal battery that may provide reliable and fast charging for future EVs to help bring them into the mass market.ĭeveloped by researchers in the lab of Xin Li, PhD, Associate Professor of Materials Science at Harvard John A. Primavera Capital Group led Adden Energy’s seed round, with participation by Rhapsody Venture Partners and MassVentures. But the chemistry and design of lithium-metal should allow the technology to go small sometime in the near future.WALTHAM, Mass.-( BUSINESS WIRE)- Adden Energy, Inc., a startup developing innovative solid-state battery systems for use in future electric vehicles (EVs) that would fully charge in minutes, announced the grant of an exclusive technology license by Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development (OTD) and a seed round financing of $5.15M. That won’t happen with the lithium-metal solid-state technology design which can be compared to a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato (BLT) sandwich as seen in the illustration above.Ĭan the battery be scaled down for use where lithium-ion is found today? Think cell phones and A, AA, AAA rechargeables? For the moment, the Harvard invention is at the EV battery-pack scale. That degradation you may have experienced when your smartphone starts to overheat. The secret to the design of the Harvard battery is an innovative multilayer self-healing assembly which deals with degradation common to lithium-ion battery technology. That too is an impressive performance improvement. And one other thing, this new battery fully recharges in between 10 and 20 minutes. So the performance demonstrated by this Harvard team’s lithium-metal battery at 631.1 Wh/kg and 10,000 discharge and recharge cycles is indeed impressive. Even so, current lithium-ion batteries come with 8-year warranties or 160,000 kilometres (100,000 miles) drive limits which probably means if you currently own an EV, at some point that warranty is going to come into play requiring a new battery pack. Lithium-ion battery packs on average can be discharged and recharged about 900 times before the upper capacity begins to degrade. Hydrogen fuel cells in comparison produce 530 Wh/kg. And the flexibility and versatility of our multilayer design makes it potentially compatible with mass production procedures in the battery industry.”Ĭurrent lithium-ion battery packs produce around 250 Wh/kg. In an interview by Anthony Cuthbertson of The Independent, Li is quoted stating, “This….design shows that lithium-metal solid-state batteries could be competitive with commercial lithium-ion batteries. It means EVs equipped with these batteries will easily match the durability of gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles which on average is between 10 and 15 years. The 631.1-watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg) measure achieved by this battery, and its ability to retain 82% capacity after 10,000 discharge-recharge cycles leaves lithium-ion battery packs in the dust. A battery with greater density, lighter in weight, and more durable in terms of discharge-recharge cycles would be the breakthrough the planet needs to ween ourselves off the internal combustion engine and the greenhouse gas contributions this technology contributes to global warming. But the energy density and durability of the technology have led to range and ownership anxiety on the part of potential purchasers of EVs. Lithium-ion batteries today dominate the electric vehicle (EV) industry. Team lead, Associate Professor Xin Li described their effort as a search for the Holy Grail of batteries which Li believes has been found. In the journal Nature this month, a team at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences published the results of their research into solid-state battery design.
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