Hitachi Doubles Life of Lithium-Ion Battery with Manganese Based Electrode

Hitachi Ltd., a leading Japanese manufacturer of electronics, announced on April 5, 2010, that its newly developed technology can double the lifetime of industrial-use, lithium-ion batteries with manganese base positive electrodes.

Currently, as a base material of positive electrodes in lithium-ion batteries, cobalt is widely used even though it is a rare resource. Hitachi has been working to find a lithium manganese material capable of replacing cobalt as a positive electrode base material because manganese is an abundant resource. Targeting issues such as battery capacity deterioration arising from the increase in battery charge-discharge cycles, it has succeeded in stabilizing the crystal structure of manganese material by replacing a part of manganese element with other element and in decreasing the dissolution of manganese into the electrolytic solution by adding composite oxide which has high acid-resistance into the material.

Hitachi developed a prototype battery cell with the newly developed material and had positive
evaluation results showing that deterioration of the cell capacity could be reduced to half compared to existing manganese batteries, and the cell could last more than ten years, about two times the lifetime of an ordinary lithium-ion battery cell with a positive electrode made of manganese material.

This technology is one of the achievements of Hitachi's ongoing project to develop elemental technologies on power storage systems which facilitate grid-connectivity, which is being sponsored by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) of Japan. Production of the prototype cell was a joint effort by Hitachi and Shin-Kobe Electric Machinery Co., Ltd.

Hitachi Ltd. global site
http://www.hitachi.com/

Posted: 2010/07/15 06:00:15 AM