Japanese first to mass-produce tiny 'safe' lithium battery
No electrolyte to leak or explode, it's claimed
Japan's Ulvac has become the first company to put solid-state thin-film lithium batteries into mass production, it claimed this week.
Ulvac's pitching the power source as an alternative to today's lithium-ion rechargeables, specifically by stressing that its design contains no liquid electrolyte and therefore is incapable of... well.. blowing up.
The company also claimed its battery design is thin, lightweight and can be made applied to flexible materials.
The batteries are made using the thin-film deposition process, applying lithium cobalt cathode, (solid) lithium phosphate electrolyte and lithium anode layers to a substrate material. With a protective coating applied, the battery is no more than 15µm thick, excluding the substrate.
Ulvac said it sees the battery technology being applied to particularly small devices, such as medical sensors and near-field communications kit, and in secondary power-supply roles in larger devices.
The company indicated it is researching ways to make the technology bigger, to power mobile devices and, ultimately, electric vehicles.
It also wants to explore connecting microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to the battery. Such devices could be used to convert, say, a device's motion into electrical power that can then be stored in its thin-film lithium batteries.
COMMENTS
All of the above
Capacities are ~ 0.3mA/cm2 or more but they are so thin you can pack a lot of cm2 into a 1mm thick package! Discharge rates of 25C at room temp and 100C at 80oC and 300C at 150oC! The batteries can be OPERATED at 150oC so BOOM is not only NOT true,higher temps enable improved operation. Bare Li films from these batteries in the lab are completely safe even when heated to 150oC. Throw one (or even a piece of Li foil) into water and you get heat and H2 released, but there is nothing to burn. The only reason Li ion batteries burst into flames is the presence of the highly volatile solvents in the liquid electrolyte that reach flash point when the batteries overheat. There's a company in Atlanta that makes these thin film all solid state cells/batteries and you can get samples to try for yourself.
In other news...
...Sony has purchased a small Japanese battery company...
life?
but do they perform for longer and have a longer total life?
- love those boffins though.
Shurely...
your are referring to cells not batteries? A battery being a collection of cells, therefore size will vary greatly.
