I used to be just lately capable of interview Celina Mikolajczak, Chief Battery Know-how Officer at Lyten. Beforehand, she labored with Tesla for greater than 6 years as a high battery engineer and supervisor. She’s additionally frolicked at Panasonic, Uber, and Quantumscape. She’s enthusiastic about bringing lithium-sulfur batteries into a brand new period at Lyten, one by which they’ll turn out to be vital to electrical flight, electrical heavy-duty trucking, and extra. Let’s bounce into what she informed us for CleanTech Speak.
After telling us a bit about her intensive and deep background within the lithium-ion battery house (together with main up the “cell high quality” division at Tesla when ramping up the Mannequin S and being the pinnacle of Uber’s battery division within the time frame when Uber dabbled with moving into the {hardware} enterprise and eVTOL plane), Celina Mikolajczak summarized Lyten and its work for us. “Lyten is definitely a supplies firm. We make three-d graphene supplies. They’re completely different than planar graphene. They arrive in all types of various shapes. So, what it does is it permits you to make these supplies work in loads of completely different functions. So, a few of the 3D graphenes that we make might be used to light-weight composites; they can be utilized to enhance concrete — simply by being blended in; they can be utilized for a wide range of completely different sensors as a result of they’ve tremendous excessive floor space — so you are able to do vapor sensing, you are able to do resident sensing. Tremendous attention-grabbing.
“One of many different issues that they’ll do is that they’ll maintain onto different molecules, and for lithium-sulfur batteries, they’ll maintain onto sulfur. Now, what’s a lithium-sulfur battery? It’s sort of like a lithium-ion battery — however solely sort of. Lithium is the ion that strikes forwards and backwards between anode and cathode, however as an alternative of getting a blended metallic oxide and NCA like what’s in my Mannequin 3, or an NMC, you employ sulfur because the cathode — and that’s sort of attention-grabbing. Sulfur is extremely plentiful. It’s extremely low-cost. So if you speak about wanting to impress all the things, the solely means you get there’s with a lithium-sulfur chemistry. As a result of sulfur is so plentiful you could truly do that.” Properly, that’s a daring assertion!
“You already know, I need to electrify all the things, proper? And the solely means you electrify all the things is you go to a chemistry like lithium-sulfur, as a result of that’s if you get to a chemistry that may be low-cost sufficient that everybody’s automobile can run on a battery, it’s low-cost sufficient and plentiful sufficient you could make grid storage and issues like Powerwalls tremendous accessible and plentiful. So, with lithium-sulfur, you’re actually going after vitality abundance for the world, which — is superb. It’s additionally tremendous arduous!”
Somewhat afterward in our dialog, we received into the advantages of lithium-sulfur batteries a bit extra. “One of many nice issues about lithium-sulfur is it’s tremendous light-weight,” Celina emphasised. “So, you’ll be able to check out doubling the vitality densities of a battery with lithium-sulfur in comparison with standard lithium-ion. The volumetric vitality density, mmm, inferior to nickel, however we consider we are able to make it higher than LFP. So, you’re speaking about vitality densities which might be means past LFP and volumetrically about the identical. That’s superb.
“And if you speak concerning the Tesla Semi, lithium-sulfur might be going to get its first large-scale implementation in heavy tools and vans. Something that’s large, the place curb weight issues, lithium-sulfur’s going to be superb for that. … After which, as a result of the value of sulfur is so low in comparison with nickel, I anticipate that that is going to be the battery that’s going to be the finances choice — for the common automobile.” She’s referring particularly to one thing that’s a “way more finances automobile” than a Tesla Mannequin 3, just like the a lot mentioned “$25,000” Tesla that’s speculated to be coming and even cheaper EVs.
Yet one more spotlight I’ll pull out from the interview comes from the tip of the podcast. I requested Celina what truly hooked her about lithium-sulfur batteries and received her to modify to a concentrate on them. She responded, “The CEO of Lyten received me to come back out and speak to him and have dinner, and he’s speaking to me about these loopy vitality densities that he can obtain and what prices he thinks he can obtain, and I’m considering, ‘God, the man is nuts, nobody can do that,’ after which I began trying [into] this chemistry and I’m like, ‘Wait, perhaps you can do that.’”
For extra on battery chemistries, battery mineral provide, battery functions, and lithium-sulfur battery advantages, take heed to the complete podcast. You can even go to the Lyten web site. Celina additionally gave her perspective on forecasts for the lithium-sulfur battery market in coming years and on the place lithium-sulfur battery improvement matches relative to the historic improvement of different kinds of batteries.
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