Will This Anodeless Solid-State Battery Design Be the One?

• Battery startup Ion Energy Storage reveals that its anodeless solid-state battery design has achieved 800 cycles without volume change or compression.

• The battery developer will receive $20 million from the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), along with another $20 million in private funds to commercialize its design.

• Ion has teamed up with ceramics and glass maker Saint-Gobain, which will produce ceramic powder for its battery design.

In traditional lithium-ion battery cells the number of charge and discharge cycles a battery can endure with acceptable degradation effectively determines EV range after a few years of usage, with a number of other factors also being able to affect long-term battery life.

Battery longevity has been one of the promises of solid-state battery tech, which could allow for far less range loss in vehicles over time—at least in theory.

Maryland-based battery developer Ion Storage Systems revealed earlier this month that its fast-charging, anodeless solid-state batteries have achieved 800 cycles without volume change or compression, pointing the way to a much more durable battery design. Earlier this spring, Ion's design reached and exceeded the 125-cycle mark.

Instead of using graphite or other materials, Ion's anodeless design relies on a three-dimensional ceramic structure.

"It is unprecedented for an anodeless cell to reach this kind of cycle life without compression. ION has now produced a cell with performance that's compelling to replace a huge portion of the lithium-ion market," said the company's CTO, Greg Hitz.

Another claimed advantage of Ion's design is the lack of need for a cooling system, which is something that in cars requires quite a bit of engineering (and therefore added weight) to manage properly, including fire barriers.

"Next up is building it into commercial format, multilayer cells off our pilot line and doing so with high repeatability to put in customers' hands," Hitz added.

A belief that lithium-ion batteries aren't up to the task is one of the driving forces behind Ion's research, according to its CEO, and the EV industry appears to agree even if making the jump from lab designs to mass production has been out of the industry's grasp for the past few years, despite some promising research.

Earlier this year Ion Storage Systems commissioned a solid-state production pilot line in Beltsville, Maryland, with an aim to start assembling 1 megawatt hours of battery cells starting later this year. The company plans to expand that capacity to 10 mWh by 2025, while aiming for 500 mWh of capacity by 2028.

"The stable cycling that we've repeatedly observed in our R&D cells is the culmination of key innovations by Ion's ceramic scientists and battery scientists over the past several years," said Nicholas Hudak, Director of Cell R&D at Ion. "The combination of our next-generation ceramic electrolyte and unique cell architecture has enabled the only known anodeless, compressionless, lithium-metal battery that can cycle with this level of stability at 25°C [77°F]."

Of course, achieving a high number of charge and discharge cycles in the lab is one thing, and mass manufacturing the cells is quite another. For the past few years, it has been the transition from pilot assembly to mass production that has stymied most solid-state battery developers.

Curiously, EVs are not the first nor second major planned application of Ion's battery design. The company plans to commercialize it first for the Department of Defense, and then for small consumer electronics. EVs will come third.

Earlier this summer Ion said it will receive $20 million from the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), along with another $20 million in private funds, to scale up its solid-state design.

Last summer the battery developer also teamed up with ceramics manufacturer Saint-Gobain on plans to commercialize its design, with the company expected to use its proprietary process to produce ceramic powder.

Ion is certainly not alone in the race to a solid-state design that can be mass produced at an acceptable cost and a large-enough volume to be used in EVs, and it's clear that we could see a wide variety of designs and compositions in the coming years.

Will we see solid-state batteries in mass-produced EVs in this decade, or will traditional lithium-ion batteries be around for a while longer? Let us know what you think in the comments below.