Chemical Engineering May 2017 - 11

Novel approach to Si-metal anodes could lower
Li-ion battery cost
A
new approach to making
silicon-based anodes for
lithium-ion batteries has the
potential to lower materials
costs for batteries, while achieving
higher energy and power. Siliconbased
anodes are attractive because
of silicon's natural abundance
and its high specific capacity, but
R&D efforts aimed at incorporating
silicon into electrodes have not succeeded
at allowing sufficiently long
cycle lives and high performance at
lower cost.
As an anode in Li-ion batteries,
silicon's volume expands and contracts
a great deal during chargedischarge
cycles, which strains the
material and pulverizes it, reducing
lifetime. Therefore, Si-based anodes
require a balancing act to maximize
energy capacity by increasing
Si content, while maintaining the
structural integrity of the anode over
many charge-discharge cycles, and
doing all that at low cost, explains
David Lee, CEO of BioSolar LLC
(Santa Clarita, Calif.; www.biosolar.
com). Lee's company has demonstrated
a novel Si-metal anode that
accommodates Si's expansion,
maintains electrode capacity and
allows for the use of less expensive
raw materials.
Biosolar uses a unique set of materials
and a proprietary process to
embed Si nanoparticles in a metalalloy
matrix. Special efforts are
made to minimize tiny defects in
the initial manufacture of the anode
to prevent cracking during chargedischarge.
Further, the material is
designed to improve hardness and
retard crack growth, resulting in a
resilient and longer-lasting material,
Lee says.
CMS-5686-Powerof7-Idea-CE_FINAL.pdf 1 4/7/17 8:31 AM
A critical aspect of the design
of the anode material is its ability
to use a higher level of raw metal
material for the matrix as a costreduction
measure. " By allowing
the use of more raw metal, we can
lower our material costs without
losing any electrode performance, "
Lee says. " In this way, we can realize
a Si-based anode with higher
capacity that is less expensive than
the Si-graphite composites and Sioxide
anodes currently under development
as successors to the
conventional graphite anode. "
Biosolar is aiming to commercialize
the anode material for use with
a host of commercially available
Li-ion battery cell configurations,
in addition to its ability to be paired
with a novel cathode material already
commercialized by the company
(Chem. Eng., March 2016, p.
8). After successfully demonstrating
the anode material in a prototype
battery, Biosolar is seeking a
joint development partner to scale
up and build larger prototypes.
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11
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Chemical Engineering May 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Chemical Engineering May 2017
