Free The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World by Steve LeVine

Dalhousie University. Jeff Dahn, a blunt and outspoken battery researcher whose own version of the NMC had been patented by the 3M Company just after the Argonne pair, announced a big jump in the material’s performance. It happened when, as an experiment, he juiced the voltage. The capacity surged.
    If you pack lithium into a battery and apply voltage to move it from the cathode to the anode—the act of charging the battery—the structure puts up fierce resistance. It restricts the lithium’s free movement, thus limiting how fast energy can be extracted, and thus how fast a car could go. Some goes astray along the way, stuck in one or the other side of the battery. In the case of NMC, it had high energy—you could pack in a lot of lithium—but relatively low power, meaning that you could not extract the lithium very fast. What Dahn did was to raise the voltage used to charge the battery above 4.5 volts—to about 4.8 volts, considerably more than the usual 4.3. That boost triggered a race of shuttling electrons. The result was staggering. Theoretically speaking, Dahn was putting almost all of the lithium into motion between the cathode and the anode. In principle, you should not have been able to extract that much lithium from the cathode, thus removing important walls from the latticework of the cathode—the house of oxygen and metal atoms should collapse. But Dahn discovered that he
could
do so.
    Johnson went into the lab and tried to duplicate Dahn’s claims using the Li 2 MnO 3 . He pushed the voltage over 4.5 volts. Just as Dahn had reported, the capacity surged.
    It was an important discovery. The numbers told the tale. Ordinarily, lithium-ion batteries such as Goodenough’s lithium-cobalt-oxide store around 140 milliampere-hours of electric charge per gram, a revolutionary capacity when it was invented but insufficient for the ambitions of the new electric age. By pushing the voltage, Johnson was getting much more—250 milliampere-hours per gram, which was even higher than the 220 that Dahn was reporting. Trying again, Johnson got 280, almost twice lithium-cobalt-oxide’s performance. The experiments suggested that the NMC was even more powerful than they had thought on pioneering it five years earlier—far more. At once Li 2 MnO 3 was not simply a fortifying agent, as had been presumed. At just over 4.5 volts, it came alive in a very muscular manner. At this higher voltage, you activated a new, heretofore unrecognized dimension of NMC. This was NMC 2.0, the breakthrough that could push electric cars over the bar and challenge gasoline-fueled engines.
    The Argonne men published their own results immediately. As for the IP, they were covered—the jump in capacity at higher voltage was simply a new understanding of the original 2000 application.
    Working in the lab with his own team, Amine made an additional advance. It was in a usually overlooked part of the battery—the electrolyte in which the cathode and anode are submerged. It is this liquid that allows ions from the anode to migrate to the cathode, and vice versa. But sometimes the battery becomes overcharged, creating the risk of fire, a phenomenon that had already inflicted considerable public relations damage on lithium-ion batteries and products containing them—you could have only so many laptops burst into flames in airport lounges and elsewhere before consumers began to worry. Amine’s team invented and patented a new molecule based on boron and fluorine that, when added in powder form in minuscule amounts to the electrolyte, absorbed excess electrons and thus reduced the chance of fire. Amine was a full-fledged member of the NMC team, a handful of researchers who had now expanded their work into a constellation of patents centered on the NMC that was arguably more valuable than any rival new battery work.

11
The New Boss
    N ot much more came of the NMC until the arrival of Jeff Chamberlain at Argonne in 2006. Chamberlain was tall, muscular,