Chinese company SVOLT Energy's cobalt-free batteries are manufactured using single-crystal cobalt-free material technology, stacked cell design technology, matrix PACK design technology, and automotive specification-level AI manufacturing to achieve a vehicle range of over 800 km and a life of over 15 years and 1.2 million km.

On May 18, Yang Hongxin, president of SVOLT Energy Technology (formerly the Battery Business Unit of Great Wall Motor), said the above at the SVOLT Energy cobalt-free battery line launch.

Industry insiders say that cobalt-free anode materials will play a major role in driving the explosive growth of the electric vehicle market.

SVOLT Energy is a power cell company that was spun off by Great Wall Motor in 2018 to grow independently.

At the conference, Yang Hongxin said that some key problems have not been well solved on the way to the practical application of cobalt-free materials.

For example, the +2 valence nickel ion occupies the lithium ion position, hinders the lithium disembedding, making the lithium-nickel mixed row large; cycle performance is not ideal, need to be at high voltage to charge and discharge.

SVOLT Energy has improved the lithium-nickel-ion mixing and cycle life issues of cobalt-free laminates to the point of scale.

According to Yang Hongxin, there are three technologies that are extremely critical to solving these problems, namely cation doping, single crystal technology and nano-networked wrapping.

The cationic doping technique can increase the upper voltage of the material and achieve a 40% increase in energy density over lithium iron phosphate, using two elements with stronger chemical bonding energy instead of cobalt, doped into the material and stabilizing the oxygen octahedral structure through strong chemical bonding.

The technology reduces lithium-nickel mixing, improves the stability of the material, and enables stable operation at 4.3-4.35 volts, resulting in higher energy density and lower costs.

Compared with polycrystalline, monocrystalline has stronger particle strength and more stable structure, and core life can be 70% higher than polycrystalline high nickel ternary.

In addition, SVOLT Energy uses a nano-network wrapping technique in the synthesis of cobalt-free materials, in which a layer of nano-oxide is wrapped around the surface of a single crystal, which can reduce the side reactions of the cathode material and electrolyte, and this technique can improve the cycling performance of the material at high voltages.

At present, the 500kg class has been completed in the pilot line and has entered the small batch production stage of tonnage.

The cell uses a laminated design process that increases the energy density of the cobalt-free cell by another 5% and the cycle life by another 10%.

The PACK design is matrix-based, dividing the battery pack into two matrix networks, which reduces the weight of the non-value-added parts of the PACK and achieves 80% grouping efficiency.

SVOLT Energy also unveiled two electric cells at the launch. The first cell has a capacity of 115Ah and an energy density of 245Wh/kg and can be carried on most of the new pure electric platforms available today.

The second product is the L6 cobalt-free long cell with a capacity of 226Ah, which is being developed for compatibility with a high-end model of the Great Wall and is equipped with a matrix PACK design, which can achieve a long range of 880km.

The product is expected to hit the market in the second half of 2021.