APB Corp founder Hideaki Horie has received backing from a swath of Japanese firms to develop a new kind of battery that would significantly decrease production costs and improve safety, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
The battery, which would replace the intricate battery parts such as metal-lined electrodes and liquid electrolytes with a resin material, would be more like mass producing steel instead of the complex production process that lithium-ion batteries undergo today.
This complex process requires pricey clean rooms that only a handful of industry players can afford.
What’s more, the resin-based battery would also be fire resistant even when punctured. Fire safety has dogged lithium-ion batteries for years, with multiple fires, some of which have grabbed headlines. One such fire was of lithium-ion batteries carried by a FedEx truck in 2016. The fire destroyed the truck and its contents, and was attributed to a safety loophole that doesn’t require low production or prototype lithium-ion batteries to undergo the same level of testing that mass production batteries are subject to prior to being transported.
Even more headline-grabbing were a series of alleged battery fires in Teslas that raised even more awareness for battery safety.
APB’s bipolar battery design would prevent traditional power bottlenecks that are present in lithium-ion batteries that cause batteries to overheat, instead allowing the whole surface of the battery to absorb any power surges that are often created by punctures.
So far, APB has raised close to $80 million, which is sufficient to startup one mass-production factory in Japan that will start next year, growing to a capacity of 1 gigawatt-hour by 2023.
While the battery addresses the safety and cost issues of lithium-ion batteries, the resin material is less conductive than metal, so the carrying capacity would be reduced.
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