Solid-state EV battery startup Adden Energy has received an exclusive technology license from Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development, and $5.15 million in seed financing from Primavera Capital Group, Rhapsody Venture Partners and MassVentures. Adden Energy plans to use the funding to scale up a solid-state coin-cell prototype developed by researchers in Xin Li’s Harvard laboratory.

“We have achieved in the lab 5,000 to 10,000 charge cycles in a battery’s lifetime, compared with 2,000 to 3,000 charging cycles for even the best in class now, and we don’t see any fundamental limit to scaling up our battery technology,” says Li.

Adden Energy says the coin cell, which has a lithium metal anode, has reached a charge rate of three minutes.

“We defeat the growth of dendrites before they can cause damage, by novel structural and material designs,” says CTO of Adden Energy Luhan Ye. 

In an article published in Nature, Ye and Li write: “Our multilayer design has the structure of a less-stable electrolyte sandwiched between more-stable solid electrolytes, which prevents any lithium dendrite growth through well-localized decompositions in the less-stable electrolyte layer. A mechanism analogous to the expansion screw effect is proposed, whereby any cracks are filled by dynamically generated decompositions that are also well constrained, probably by the ‘anchoring’ effect the decompositions induce.”

Adden Energy says it “aims to scale the battery up to a palm-sized pouch cell, and then upward toward a full-scale vehicle battery in the next three to five years.”

Source: Adden Energy