TECH

Expect Future Phones To Hold More Charge, Solid-state Batteries Might Be Replacing The Current Li-ion Technology

You surely must have heard of solid state drivers, but a solid-state battery might still be new to your ears. The traditional batteries that we use are lithium-ion which have liquid components for electrodes and electrolytes, while the solid state batteries will of course remove these liquid components replacing them with solid conductive metals.
Solid state batteries, a high-end capacity storage solution which will overpower the current generation of lithium-ion batteries, and has begun production in China according to a Chinese media website. The Chinese startup Qing Tao (Kunshan) Energy Development Co. Ltd, with the backing of 1Billion Yuan (144 million U.S. dollars) have setup a fully functional solid-state battery production line in the city of Kunshan, east China. The company has a team of several PhD members from Tsinghua University, one of the most renowned technical universities in China.
These batteries are being used for special equipment and high end digital products for now and aim to make a big breakthrough in the automobile industry. With the production line being capable of producing 0.1 GWh solid-state batteries per year, the company aims to get engaged with multiple large scale automobile manufacturers such as Volkswagen, Toyota and Dyson, who too are aiming to replace Li-ion batteries with the new solid-state batteries.
Nan Cewen, executive for the startup claims that with the new production line they have managed to set the bar high and achieve an energy density of “over 400Wh/kg” while the traditional lithium-ion batteries only have an energy density of 250-300 Wh/kg.
The pricing and stability of these new generation batteries are still mostly unknown but there have been significant investments in this field from big names such as Bosch only to find out that the commercialization of solid-state batteries is not the most feasible return on investments.


Umang Chauhan