Extreme Fast Charging LFP Cathode Battery Materials

Range anxiety, charging speeds, and the sourcing of raw materials continue to complicate the EV industry, leading to lower-than-expected adoption rates and reliance on unsustainable mining practices. Cell manufacturers and OEMs alike are striving to improve charging speeds to enhance consumers’ experiences with electric vehicles and find ways to improve sustainability.

Assembled from two decades of research and innovation, our Aerogel Technology Platform™ is a continued source of our commercial breakthroughs. In the case of our advanced LFP aerogel program, we recognized from the outset that our patented process offered a 10x C-rate improvement to charge the batteries of the future faster than ever. With our extreme-fast-charging (XFC) LFP cathodes, we can expect to achieve single digital charge times.

Conventional LFP vs Extreme-Fast-Charging (XFC) LFP Cathodes

Conventional LFP cathodes suffer from numerous issues during fast and extremely fast charging conditions. Sintering of LFP and agglomeration reduce pathways for the flow of lithium-ions, high resistance at grain boundary layers, and incoherent carbon coverage. Aspen Aerogels XFC LFP cathode suspends and separates the LFP material in carbon aerogel, which is highly conductive, which keeps the LFP separate and prevents sintering and agglomeration while creating a structural, highly conductive carbon network.

We are working alongside Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with a grant from the Department of Energy, to scale up from bench to pilot-scale with the goal of reducing the use of unsustainable materials like nickel and cobalt while simultaneously reducing battery charging time to 5-10 minutes.