Innovative Technology Developed at Rutgers Could Make Lithium-Ion Batteries Safer
Significantly thinner than a strand of hair, the technology could be used in everyday consumer electronics, smart home gadgets and electric vehicles
A Rutgers engineering professor and his team have developed technology that could make lithium-ion batteries safer, lighter, potentially smaller, and cheaper to produce.
Professor Glenn Amatucci and his co-inventors, Anna Halajko and Linda Wu Sung, pioneered the technology a decade ago. Rutgers has now contracted with Soteria Battery Innovation Group, a South Carolina-based company that manages a consortium dedicated to lithium-ion battery safety. The contract allows Amatucci and his team to work with and through the consortium to bring the technology to the market.
“In a standard lithium-ion battery, which is used for everything from everyday consumer electronics to smart home gadgets to electric vehicles, the conventional current collectors are thin foils of aluminum and copper, perhaps the thickness of a strand of hair,” Amatucci said. “We created current collectors made of polymers that are then coated with thin films of metal, around 20 times thinner than a strand of hair.”
Amatucci is the director of the Energy Storage Research Group (ESRG) within Rutgers-New Brunswick, comprised of faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students working in an off-campus lab.
The current-collector technology developed at Rutgers is cheaper to produce than standard current collectors, offers flexibility for wearable battery technologies, unique porosity to enable electrolyte distribution throughout the cell, which increases performance uniformity and reduces electrolyte activation time during cell manufacture, and less volume.
“The industry often talks about battery safety in terms of what happens during failure,” said Brian Morin, CEO of Soteria Battery Innovation Group. “But a major part of safety is also about designing cells that are mechanically robust from the beginning. The Rutgers technology introduces a fundamentally different current collector architecture that could help support more resilient battery designs while reducing weight and material usage.”
In addition, it offers an added safety benefit, which Soteria has promoted with its own polymer-based current collectors. When batteries using these current collectors reach a certain temperature, the polymer melts, retracts, and automatically shuts off the battery, preventing overheating. This synergistic connection is what sparked Soteria, a company focused on improving battery safety through its Battery Safety Consortium, to license the technology as part of its global goal to enable the “safe manufacture and use of batteries everywhere.”
The U.S. Department of Energy’s website explains that batteries feature two electrical terminals, the cathode (positive side) and the anode (negative side), and in between them is a chemical material called an electrolyte, through which ions (electrically charged atoms) flow. According to Amatucci, the electrons that emerge from each electrode move to the current collectors, which then deliver the energy as power to the connected devices.
“Batteries include a battery monitoring system, or BMS, that looks at the temperature of the battery, how much charge it has, and its history, and is smart enough to shut it off if it's not behaving well,” Amatucci said. “Our technology provides batteries with an extra level of safety.”
Soteria’s Battery Safety Consortium features a unique Intellectual Property Exchange, a collaborative licensing platform that brings together safety-enabling technologies from innovators across the battery ecosystem under a single license, making them more accessible to battery manufacturers and end-users.
Rutgers’ Office for Research managed the negotiations between the university and Soteria, with assistance from the Office for General Counsel, and executed the license agreement.
“Something that often gets lost in the world of research is how much of a team effort it is, including the researchers, their post-docs and students, and university staff, including the Technology Transfer unit,” Amatucci said. “Whether you're conducting the research, working within the lab or school, or negotiating the contract for funding or licensing, we all play a role in the success of the innovation. The Office for Research’s Technology Transfer office has always been incredibly helpful and flexible no matter how unique the situation is, and I appreciate their support.”
“The Technology Transfer office has collaborated with Dr. Amatucci for many years, and we were not surprised that Soteria was interested in licensing the current collector technology he and his team developed,” said Deb Perez Fernandez, the executive director of the Technology Transfer unit within the Office for Research. “Our purpose is to make sure Rutgers innovations are protected, while simultaneously supporting researchers on their commercialization journeys, and we look forward to the positive impact Dr. Amatucci’s innovation will have on the world.”
