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Cost and performance analysis as a valuable tool for battery material research

Nature Reviews Materials (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Cost and performance analysis is a powerful tool to support material research for battery energy storage, but it is rarely applied in the field and often misinterpreted. Widespread use of such an analysis at the stage of material discovery would help to focus battery research on practical solutions. When correctly used and well detailed, it can effectively direct efforts towards selecting appropriate materials for commercial applications. Using sodium-ion batteries as an example, we simulate the energy density and the cost of battery packs with several sodium-ion cathode materials taken from the literature in three case studies that illustrate how to identify the most promising solutions from the results of the model. Using publicly available information on material properties and open-source software, we demonstrate how a battery cost and performance analysis could be implemented using typical data from laboratory-scale studies on new energy storage materials.

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Fig. 1: Electrode potentials of cathode and anode and resulting cell voltages of the materials analysed in the lower cut-off voltage study.
Fig. 2: Electrode potentials of cathode and anode and resulting cell voltages of the materials analysed in the study of pre-sodiation for capacity increase of cathode materials.
Fig. 3: Electrode potentials of cathode and anode and resulting cell voltages of the materials analysed in the study of pre-sodiation for first-cycle sodium loss compensation.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Helmholtz Association for basic funding.

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Author notes

  1. Alessandro Innocenti

    Present address: Zentrum für Sonnenenergie- und Wasserstoff-Forschung Baden-Württemberg, Ulm, Germany

  2. These authors contributed equally: Alessandro Innocenti, Simon Beringer.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Helmholtz Institute Ulm (HIU) Electrochemical Energy Storage, Ulm, Germany

    Alessandro Innocenti, Simon Beringer & Stefano Passerini

  2. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

    Alessandro Innocenti, Simon Beringer & Stefano Passerini

  3. Department of Chemistry, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Stefano Passerini

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Contributions

A.I. and S.P. conceived the idea. A.I. and S.B. read and summarized the relevant literature, carried out the simulations, analysed the results and visualized the data. A.I. wrote the original draft. S.P. revised the original draft, supervised the project and acquired the funding.

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Correspondence to Stefano Passerini.

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Nature Reviews Materials thanks Jens Leker, Arumugam Manthiram, Stephan von Delft and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

In the Supplementary Information, it is possible to access: the data used as input for the simulations of the sodium-ion batteries; additional figures with the comparison of the energy density and the cost of battery packs and the voltage profiles before and after increasing the lower cut-off voltage; details on the implementation of the initial coulombic efficiency of anode and cathode and the use of sacrificial salt as pre-sodiation additive; the spreadsheets with all the relevant simulation results, the data analysis, as well as the original figures.

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Innocenti, A., Beringer, S. & Passerini, S. Cost and performance analysis as a valuable tool for battery material research. Nat Rev Mater (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-024-00657-2

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