Tucson company gets $5M grant for battery work

Below is an article in Tucson's Arizona Daily Star newspaper on April 30. A set of batteries with only 500 charging cycles?? What good is this? Maybe these batteries are for industrial vehicles like forklifts, etc. It's a local story so I thought I would post it.

Tucson-based Sion Power Corp. has been awarded a $5 million federal grant to further develop its lithium-sulfur battery technology for use in electric cars. The award, part of $106 million in grants nationwide announced Thursday by the U.S. Department of Energy, will fund efforts to develop an ultra-high-energy battery that can power electric vehicles for more than 300 miles between charges.

The grant is part of the DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program, funded with federal stimulus money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It follows an $800,000 grant the DOE awarded to Sion in June for battery research.
Sion's approach uses new manufacturing processes and barrier layers within the batteries to improve cycle life - the number of times a battery can be recharged - as well as safety.

Sion CEO Dennis Mangino said the three-year grant, which will be matched by the company, will help Sion develop prototype car batteries by 2014. The company, which employs about 60 people, already makes small lithium-sulfur batteries.
Mangino said the key to the company's success in developing batteries to power electric cars is extending their cycle life.
The company expects to be able to achieve a cycle life of 500 charge cycles, he said. That compares with a goal of 1,000 cycles sought by the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium, a research group formed by Chrysler, Ford and General Motors.

But Sion's batteries promise twice the power capacity of other technologies, offsetting the lower cycle life, Mangino said.
"There's not going to be any other technology that can deliver the capacity our technology can deliver," he said.
Last year, Sion signed a joint development agreement with the German chemical giant BASF SE to accelerate battery development.
BASF is a partner with Sion on the DOE grant announced Thursday, along with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.

Sion makes small lithium-sulfur batteries for unmanned aerial vehicles and other applications. The company set a flight record in 2008 when a UAV powered by solar energy in daytime and by battery at night stayed aloft for 83 hours.

If one got 300 miles per charge for the same weight (and cost) batteries, then the 500 charges might be more like 1500 "Leaf" LiMnO battery charges (5 years of similar use).

Thanks Rich. Interesting announcement. As you observed, what good is a cycle life of 500 to 1,000? I must be missing something.

The capacity increase might be hugely significant.

Yep -- the higher the capacity, the less you need cycle life. And LiS can offer extremely high capacity.

500 cycles * 300 miles = 150,000 miles.

One downside to LiS, if I recall correctly from the papers I've read, is that once you start getting significantly capacity loss, it accelerates, while with most automotive-style li-ions, it slows. This would indicate that you can keep driving a li-ion EV well after the nominal end-of-life if you want to accept reduced range, but not so for LiS.

Thanks Karen. Indeed I was missing something.