Abstract
Cost and performance analysis is a powerful tool to support material research for battery energy storage, but it is rarely applied in the field and often misinterpreted. Widespread use of such an analysis at the stage of material discovery would help to focus battery research on practical solutions. When correctly used and well detailed, it can effectively direct efforts towards selecting appropriate materials for commercial applications. Using sodium-ion batteries as an example, we simulate the energy density and the cost of battery packs with several sodium-ion cathode materials taken from the literature in three case studies that illustrate how to identify the most promising solutions from the results of the model. Using publicly available information on material properties and open-source software, we demonstrate how a battery cost and performance analysis could be implemented using typical data from laboratory-scale studies on new energy storage materials.
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The authors thank the Helmholtz Association for basic funding.
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A.I. and S.P. conceived the idea. A.I. and S.B. read and summarized the relevant literature, carried out the simulations, analysed the results and visualized the data. A.I. wrote the original draft. S.P. revised the original draft, supervised the project and acquired the funding.
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Nature Reviews Materials thanks Jens Leker, Arumugam Manthiram, Stephan von Delft and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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In the Supplementary Information, it is possible to access: the data used as input for the simulations of the sodium-ion batteries; additional figures with the comparison of the energy density and the cost of battery packs and the voltage profiles before and after increasing the lower cut-off voltage; details on the implementation of the initial coulombic efficiency of anode and cathode and the use of sacrificial salt as pre-sodiation additive; the spreadsheets with all the relevant simulation results, the data analysis, as well as the original figures.
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Innocenti, A., Beringer, S. & Passerini, S. Cost and performance analysis as a valuable tool for battery material research. Nat Rev Mater 9, 347–357 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-024-00657-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-024-00657-2