Alluminate is developing aluminum foil-based electrode materials for low-cost and high-performance solid-state batteries.
Our goal is to create better batteries for electric vehicles using cheaper, domestically-available materials. This will involve commercializing a new aluminum-based foil anode technology, which will enable the manufacturing of batteries with higher energy density, longer cycle life, and improved safety compared to the state of the art. This technology has better performance, lower manufacturing costs, and enhanced materials sustainability compared to other battery technologies. The battery market is rapidly growing in the US due to the enormous demand for electric vehicle production. Electric vehicles offer many advantages, but there is a market segment that requires longer range between charges for adoption. Our battery technology would enable electric vehicle driving ranges of up to 500 miles, with battery cells themselves that are cheaper than alternative options. This addresses an urgent market need for longer-range electric vehicles.
The project team will be led by Prof. Matthew McDowell at Georgia Tech, who has 15 years of battery research experience. McDowell is a recognized expert in the area of solid-state battery science and technology as well as new anode materials and technologies for batteries. In the seed phase, McDowell will direct efforts in anode material development, interface modification, and cell fabrication and scale up. The team will also include Dr. Congcheng Wang, a senior postdoctoral researcher in PI McDowell’s research group who has extensive experience in synthesizing and fabricating aluminum alloy foils and testing them in solid-state batteries. Dr. Wang will lead technical work during the seed round. As a seed round commences, we will hire a CEO (we have multiple candidates in mind) and an additional BS or MS-level technical staff member to carry out the work.
Our anode technology comprises a unique material that is different than those being pursued by other companies, and this unique material enables solid-state batteries to be produced that offer outstanding performance characteristics. The strategy for bringing the technology to market is as follows. We will develop the material and technology to manufacture solid-state battery cells at a pilot scale, which is necessary to convince larger companies that our technology can be integrated into battery manufacturing processes. The work to be done is to upscale the size of our battery cells to full-scale (4 by 6 cm2, ~10 Ah) battery pouch cells, and to demonstrate long term (>500 cycles) cycling performance under application-relevant conditions. This size scaling requires substantial engineering and optimization effort and is a critical step to demonstrate commercial feasibility. We will build on these results to seek investment and partnerships with large OEMs, global battery companies, and venture firms. Based on the results of cycling of the pilot-scale pouch cells, we will connect with potential partners to showcase our technology. We have already made initial contact with a variety of manufacturers. We intend to leverage our data from scaled cells to pitch our idea to these manufacturers, as well as clean-energy focused venture firms.
The worldwide lithium-ion battery market is currently around $50B, and it is projected to grow to >$250B by 2030. Technologies that provide performance and cost advantages that can be manufactured in the U.S. are of immediate need, as much of the market is controlled by Asian suppliers. Our market strategy is focused on the development of our foil-based anode technology, which can be incorporated into any solid-state battery system that uses a wide variety of separator or cathode material components. We thus intend to develop and demonstrate the anode technology, and then sell this material directly to battery manufacturers making solid-state batteries (the customers). This is a similar strategy to other battery startups focused on silicon electrodes for conventional lithium-ion batteries. The main competitors of our technology are battery technologies that use silicon or lithium-metal-based anodes. Our approach will yield similar energy benefits, but we are (to our knowledge) the only organization pursuing the commercialization of dense foil-based anodes. This is a key difference, and we believe our foil materials will provide advantages over competitors because of the lower cost of manufacturing compared to other high-capacity anode technologies.
We intend to raise a seed round of ~$2M that will enable us to optimize material composition and significantly scale production to multi-layer, ampere-hour commercial-scale battery cells. We will first demonstrate our technology at single-layer pouch cell size (~0.07 Ah battery size), which features a stack of different layers, including the aluminum anode, the solid separator, the cathode, and the current collectors. Scaling of the size of the cells is expected to take ~6 months of dedicated effort to fabricate all the layers and optimize cell construction. The next step is to continue material optimization and fabricate a series of multi-layer pouch cell batteries (up to 10 Ah battery size) over the course of two years. We expect that successful scaling and demonstration during the seed stage will catalyze funding of a pilot battery fabrication line to fabricate thousands of cells at scale (~10 Ah battery size), which will be shipped to partners for testing and validation (~two years). Following successful pilot line built out, we will move toward large-scale foil manufacturing and sales to battery companies.
Our team has demonstrated significant progress in developing this new battery technology with higher energy density, improved safety, and lower manufacturing cost than conventional lithium-ion batteries. This battery technology utilizes dense aluminum-based foils as the anode in solid-state batteries, which replace the conventionally used graphite anodes. Five patents have been generated by the team to form the foundation of our technology. These patents cover the anode technology and a wide variety of its possible permutations. This technology outperforms conventional lithium-ion batteries in terms of energy density and safety, and it is highly competitive with other next-generation battery technologies such as those based on silicon and lithium metal. We have developed viable foil anode materials and demonstrated their performance in laboratory scale solid-state batteries. We are currently pursuing commercialization grant funding to allow us to perform the necessary cell fabrication and engineering to build and test large-scale pouch cells, which is a key step to demonstrate the technology at scale and to translate this technology to commercialization.
The research project at Georgia Tech was funded by a company (Novelis), who will be licensing the IP to Alluminate. We have also received a phase I grant from the Georgia Research Alliance for this effort ($25k + $25k follow-on).
