Sbir phase II: thermal runaway protection and suppression for lithium-ION batteries

This $1 million cooperative agreement from the National Science Foundation's Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships program (NSF TIP, CFDA 47.084) supports Altect Inc.'s development of thermal runaway protection and suppression technology for lithium-ion batteries. The award aims to address fire and explosion safety hazards associated with widespread lithium-ion battery use in energy storage and electric vehicles. Under certain conditions, lithium-ion batteries can catastrophically fail, resulting in an exothermic release of flammable and toxic gases. For large multi-cell systems, this thermal runaway poses risks of fires, explosions, and toxic gas releases that can endanger infrastructure and lives. Altect's proposed physiochemical approach seeks to reduce hazardous gas concentrations released during such events, providing an effective and low-cost solution to accelerate adoption of clean energy technologies dependent on large-scale battery storage. Work under the two-year cooperative agreement will further the technology through May 2024.

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this small business innovation research (sbir) project is to address fire and explosion safety hazards associated with lithium ION (LI-ION) battery energy storage technologies. Fueled by growth in the energy storage and electric vehicle industries, the LI-ION battery market is expected to grow to a size of several hundred billion dollars by 2025. Future viability of these clean energy technologies are dependent on LI-ION battery technology. However, LI-ION batteries occasionally catastrophically fail, posing thermal hazards as serious as fires and explosions. The proposed technology has the potential to be an effective, low cost solution and accelerating adoption of transformative clean energy technologies. This sbir phase i project proposes to improve the safety of LI-ION bateries. Under certain scenarios, LI-ION batteries can fail, resulting in an exothermic release of flammable and toxic gases. For applications including large multi-cell battery systems in energy storage and vehicle use, the risk of thermal runaway can result in catastrophic fires, explosions and toxic gas release that can damage nearby infrastructure and cause injury or death. Thermal runaway poses significant challenges for available suppression and mitigation systems because the hazardous gas release can continue despite suppression of the incipient fire. The proposed thermal runaway protection and suppression technology addresses the source of the hazards by exploiting a series of novel physio-chemical processes to reduce flammable and toxic gas species concentrations released during a thermal runaway event. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.