A small company in Massachusetts has developed a design for producing Lithium-Ion batteries that pack roughly twice the energy per unit volume as the ones currently on the market. The process, developed by Solid Energy Systems, Woburn, MA uses materials that are compatible with the existing Li-ion manufacturing infrastructure, enabling them to be manufactured using large-scale Li-ion assembly process.
A pilot plant, located at the company’s headquarters is already producing batteries that do indeed deliver a 2X improvement in energy density while also being less prone to thermal runaway, fire, and some of the other unsavory behavior of most Lithium-based cells. It can produce 5,000cells per month, and these are not ordinary cells, these are the lightest practical rechargeable cells in the world, all >400Wh/kg.
You can read a white paper that provides some details about Solid Energy’s battery technology, as well as the colorful origins of the company by clicking here.
The Video below provides some additional insights about how the batteries are made