Manganese-rich cathode chemistries: The once and future king? | Hacker News Reader

Manganese-rich cathode chemistries: The once and future king?

cellsiders.substack.com

32 pointsclouddrover7 comments

For those interested in learning about Cathodes, The Limiting Factor on youtube puts out some very technically great content. There is tons of information I bet the vast majority of people who follow the battery market don't know.

The videos are about Tesla Battery Day Cathodes, but its really a much more general analysis of cathodes and cobalt free cathodes.

Tesla's Polycrystal Cathode Choice and Why I got it Wrong!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgU3uIgJvAU

Tesla's Cathode Production Process

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVeqYkGXdQo

Tesla's Three Cathode Choices // Product Impact

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhrqj2kO9MU

Thanks for those. Will have a look. BTW, I think you might have meant "the vast majority"? Might have been a phone autocorrect bungle.

More like a brain bungle :)

Surprised to see lithium vanadium phosphate left out of the discussion. Vanadium is a little rarer than manganese but still more common than nickel. But LVP has a very high energy density comparable to the unobtainable LiCoO2:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssuschemeng.8b04056

A major downside is relative unevenness of the discharge voltage. This is likely to require complicated electronics.

> During spraying process, high-aspect-ratio carbon nanotubes are interweaved into lithium vanadium phosphate

As soon as you read 'nanotubes' you know its not a relevant competitive chemistry.

This is a non-commercial chemistry that is not anywhere close to being able to be used in the incredibly high volume car market. VW was talking about chemistry that are already produced at scale and already being validated in batteries, so they could be in mass-market cars in this decade.

But it sounds nice to write research paper.

This is honestly the first time I have heard of Vanadium lithium phosphate batteries, usually you hear of Vanadium in flow batteries. As far as I know, most people consider these vanadium flow batteries as basically non-competitive already.

>As soon as you read 'nanotubes' you know its not a relevant competitive chemistry.

It's a recent embodiment, LVP research is at least 20 years old. There are plenty of other methods. See e.g. (2002, ~300 citations):

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/1.1479295/meta

The comparison to flow batteries is a non sequitur, the only similarity is vanadium content.

LFP is already there, vanadium phosphate will need to show itself to be superior to at least it, which is already superior both cost, and capacity wise.

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