Lyten has made progress in stretching the lifetime of its batteries, lately seeing some samples attain as excessive as 300 cycles, Mickolajczak says. She attributes the success to Lyten’s 3D graphene materials, which helps stop undesirable facet reactions and enhance the cell’s power density. The corporate can be wanting to make use of 3D graphene, a extra difficult construction than the two-dimensional selection, in different merchandise like sensors and composites.
Even with latest progress, Lyten remains to be removed from producing batteries that may final lengthy sufficient to energy an EV. Within the meantime, the corporate plans to deliver its cells to market in locations the place lifetime isn’t fairly so vital.
Since lithium-sulfur batteries could be extraordinarily light-weight, the corporate is working with prospects constructing units like drones, for which changing the batteries regularly could be well worth the financial savings on weight, says Keith Norman, Lyten’s chief sustainability officer.
The corporate opened a pilot manufacturing line in 2023 with a most capability of 200,000 cells yearly. It lately started producing a small variety of cells, that are scheduled for supply to paying prospects later this 12 months.
The corporate hasn’t publicly shared which corporations will obtain the primary batteries. Transferring ahead, two of the corporate’s most important focuses are bettering lifetime and scaling manufacturing of each 3D graphene and battery cells, Norman says.
The highway to lithium-sulfur batteries that may energy EVs remains to be an extended one, however as Mikolajczak factors out, at this time’s staple chemistry, lithium-ion, has improved leaps and bounds on price, lifetime, and power density within the years that corporations have been working to tweak it.
Individuals have tried out an enormous vary of chemistry choices in batteries, Mikolajczak says. “To make certainly one of them actuality requires that you just put within the work.”
