QuantumScape’s lithium-metal solid-state battery replaces liquid electrolytes and graphite anodes to target faster charging and higher range for EV platforms.
Lithium-ion batteries were meant to power the electric future. Instead, their limits on charging speed, lifetime, energy density, cost, and safety exposed a harder question — one Tim Holme has spent more than a decade trying to answer.
Trained in physics and mechanical engineering, Holme began his career in academia as a research associate at Stanford University. But as portable electronics and electric vehicles began straining lithium-ion chemistry in the early 2010s, he decided to leave the lab and build something fundamentally different.of energy storage. In 2014, the team developed a ceramic solid electrolyte capable of conducting lithium ions while physically blocking electrodes, an approach that later attracted backing from Volkswagen and Bill Gates., Holme, now QuantumScape’s Chief Technology Officer, explains what it takes to make lithium-metal solid-state batteries practical for electric vehicles, and why it took so long.Tim Holme: I was studying batteries in my PhD program and then spun out the company based on what we thought was an interesting, promising technology to make solid-state batteries a reality. There was both a materials and a process challenge to bring solid state batteries to the market. They have the potential to make longer range, faster charging, safer batteries. However, they have not been commercialized due to a lot of technical challenges. That’s what we set out to solve.You spent three years as a research associate at Stanford University before leaving academia to co-found QuantumScape. What prompted that decision? I was at Stanford and I was working on solid-state batteries. We had applied for and won one of the earliest grants from theAt that point, I thought was going to be a professor somewhere, because that’s what my advisor was encouraging me to do. But I thought, you know what, this is once in a lifetime opportunity. What I care about is trying to make an impact in the world and, and I will give it a shot. Maybe this will work out. It was basically a golden opportunity.The entire focus of the company was to select the right material set to enable a lithium metal anode. It is the key to enabling the faster charge and longer range and potentially also lower cost that the solid-state technology offers. At first, we were doing fundamental work, from reading papers to synthesizing materials in our labs and testing them, doing computational studies to develop some new computational techniques to understand material stability. Then the challenge shifted from material selection to materials processing. This has been a less theoretical, more empirical approach, however, still very much a material science challenge.I guess, the long held promise of making a better battery. It was worth taking the risk because the world needs better batteries and better energy storage devices. When we started QuantumScape, what we said was the most scalable and best energy storage technology is a centuries old technology of pumping water up a hill into larger reservoirs and then letting it flow back down again when needed. I thought, there’s got to be something better, more modern, afforded to us by developments and new technologies. It also has to be mobile and miniaturized because the world is becoming increasingly digital and dynamic.The key architecture is, it’s a solid state battery and a lithium metal anode. It’s also a lithium-free anode. In a conventional lithium-ion battery, the anode is typically graphite. It stores lithium during charging, separated from the cathode by a porous polymer filled with liquid electrolyte. Even though graphite has made lithium-ion batteries safer and more practical, each lithium atom has to be hosted by six carbon atoms. This adds significant mass and volume. In our architecture, there’s no anode to start with. All of the lithium is contained in the cathode and forms a lithium-metal anode during the first charge. That same lithium then cycles back and forth, but without the graphite. Removing that graphite boosts energy density, enables faster charging because lithium travels a shorter distance. It also avoids the slow diffusion step of lithium soaking into graphite, especially at low temperatures or high states of charge. The design is also safer. We replaced the porous polymer separator with a dense ceramic material that, in a safety event like a car crash, doesn’t burn or melt. It just becomes hot while maintaining separation between the anode and cathode.What were the biggest technical challenges you faced in the early days of building QuantumScape? There are four core challenges. First, you need a solid material that can conduct lithium as fast as it moves through a liquid electrolyte. The second challenge is the interface with lithium metal. This interface is in contact with lithium for the entire lifetime of the battery and lithium is extremely reactive. The electrolyte has to remain stable while also allowing lithium to pass through that interface with very low resistance. The third challenge is long-term chemical stability against lithium. And the fourth, which is the biggest challenge, is preventing lithium from penetrating through the solid material. Lithium doesn’t form a smooth, uniform layer. It grows in mossy, dendritic structures, like tree roots pushing through concrete. The faster you try to charge the battery, the more aggressively those structures grow, which is why rechargeable lithium-metal batteries haven’t reached the market for high-rate applications like automotive. Finally, even after solving all of that, there’s a fifth challenge: manufacturing the material at low cost, in thin, large-format layers that are commercially viable for real-world batteries.QuantumScape has been backed by Bill Gates and Volkswagen. How important has that support been to the company’s development? It has been totally critical. Without a lot of money, we would not have been able to get this far. Battery development requires a lot of empirical iteration, which is slower and more costly. This partnership with Volkswagen is very important as we’ve got a giant customer. They’re in the process of making three giga factories on their own. They are also planning to have a third of their fleet electrified in the next years, which means, three million electric vehicles per year.I’ve been fortunate to work with a very strong team. But the most significant has been demonstrating that our system can withstand lithium dendrites at current densities far beyond anything previously reported. In the paper we’ve submitted, we described a high-throughput testing platform that allowed us to run hundreds of thousands of tests per year over many years to identify the right materials and processing conditions to suppress dendrite growth. We also showed that the system can operate at up to 300 milliamps per square centimeter, which is at least 10 times higher than what’s required for real-world operation. That’s been a pretty remarkable achievement. In your opinion, how close are solid-state batteries to being integrated into real-world electric vehicle platforms? We’re working very closely with Volkswagen and others to move as quickly as possible and integrate the technology into their giga factory. Volkswagen largely controls the timeline. We’re working together as a joint team to commercialize it as quickly as possible.There were many challenges, from raising the next round of funding to asking the team to keep climbing toward the next summit, especially when certain members decided it was time to move on. But the most difficult period was during the early months of COVID, in 2020. At the time, the economy contracted, companies were laying people off, the stock market dropped sharply, and our lab was shut down as we weren’t classified as essential workers. I genuinely thought that might be the end. Fortunately, within a couple of months we were back in the lab.If we were to do this again with the benefit of hindsight, we could cut straight to the chase with everything we know now, saving over a decade and a tremendous amount of money. That said, I don’t think we could have done it much better the first time around. We just had to learn a whole lot along the way.The world is going to need terawatt-hours of batteries across many applications, from mobile devices and electric vehicles to the grid and data centers. I hope that solid-state batteries will be part of that mix, and that QuantumScape’s technology will be key.I never formally studied statistics and I ended up teaching myself one the job. It provides the tools to answer how confident you are in a result, how to design experiments and how to interpret what the data is really telling you. My advice is that whether you’re working in academia or industry, it’s essential to understand statistics before and after you run an experiment, so you can design it well, use resources efficiently, analyze the results correctly and communicate your conclusions with the right level of confidence.Based in Skopje, North Macedonia. Her work has appeared in Daily Mail, Mirror, Daily Star, Yahoo, NationalWorld, Newsweek, Press Gazette and others. She covers stories on batteries, wind energy, sustainable shipping and new discoveries. When she's not chasing the next big science story, she's traveling, exploring new cultures, or enjoying good food with even better wine.
Energy &Amp Environment Evs Lithium Ion Batteries Materials Science Physics Quantumscape Solid-State Batteries Sustainability Tim Holme
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