Under carefully controlled conditions, combusting flames can be used to produce not polluting soot but rather valuable materials, including some that are critical in the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries. The demand for lithium-ion batteries is projected to skyrocket in the coming decades.
The production process Producing lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles is more material-intensive than producing traditional combustion engines, and the demand for battery materials is rising, explains Yang Shao-Horn, JR East Professor of Engineering in the MIT Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering.
And while a detailed economic analysis has yet to be performed, it seems clear that their technique will be faster, the equipment simpler, and the energy use lower than other methods of manufacturing cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries—potentially a major contribution to the ongoing energy transition.
Battery-caused fires aren’t common, but they are problem. A reporter at The Economist explains: In 2006 millions of lithium-ion battery packs made by Sony were replaced after several hundred overheated and a few caught fire. These batteries were used in laptop computers produced by a number of manufactures.
MIT combustion experts have designed a system that uses flames to produce materials for cathodes of lithium-ion batteries—materials that now contribute to both the high cost and the high performance of those batteries.
However, the amount of gas produced specific to battery capacity is independent of battery capacity. NMC batteries do tend to produce more gas than other chemistries when considering all battery types. In general prismatic cells tend to produce more off-gas than pouch followed by cylindrical cells, even when considering chemistry.