A typical lithium-ion cell contains about 25 individual materials layers per 1 mm of stack thickness, an evolutionary result after a quarter century of technology development that remains non-optimal from materials cost and volume utilization viewpoints.  This talk will discuss recent work at MIT and 24M Technologies on thick electrode designs that can reduce materials cost from non-energy-storing components while delivering necessary electrochemical kinetics and remaining highly manufacturable.  24M has developed a new semisolid electrode technology and manufacturing method that yields electrodes with several times the thickness and area capacity of conventional lithium ion electrodes, yet has transport kinetics rapid enough for all but very high power applications.  The semisolid lithium ion cells have significantly fewer inactive component layers than conventional lithium-ion cells of similar performance, and can be produced by a radically simpler process that obviates most of the electrode fabrication unit operations in conventional Li-ion, thereby lowering both materials and manufacturing cost.  At MIT, magnetic alignment methods that produce low tortuosity porosity from sacrificial pore formers have been developed, that are rapid, scalable, and naturally produce aligned porosity favorably oriented normal to the electrode plane.

Support for this work by the U.S. Department of Energy through the ARPA-E program, the Vehicle Technologies Office of EERE, and the Advanced Battery Materials Research (BMR) program is gratefully acknowledged.