Progress to All Polymer Battery

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Hideaki Horie’s innovation is to replace the battery’s basic components, which are metal-lined electrodes and liquid electrolytes, with a resin construction. He says this approach dramatically simplifies and speeds up manufacturing, making it as easy as “buttering toast.”

They make 10-meter-long battery sheets which are stacked on top of each other to increase capacity. These resin-based batteries are also resistant to catching fire when punctured.

In March, APB raised $74 million. This will be used to build a plant in central Japan with 1 gigawatt-hour capacity by 2023.

APB will first focus on stationary batteries used in buildings, offices and power plants. The stationary battery market will be worth $100 billion by 2025 worldwide — more than five times its size last year — according to estimates by Wood Mackenzie.

APB has already lined up its first customer, a large Japanese company whose niche and high-value-added products sell mostly oversea

Nissan is also working on all polymer batteries. Nissan licensed the technology to APB in 2018.

SOURCES- JApan Times, Nissan News
Written By Brian Wang, NExtbigfuture.com

11 thoughts on “Progress to All Polymer Battery”

  1. Neither of the linked articles explain it, but the nissan article gives a tiny bit of detail.
    My interpretation is:

    The dark grey walls at the left and right of the right hand diagram are actually slightly conductive, so the current can flow in through the polymer wall.
    But obviously polymers are far less conductive than metal, so you need to have the entire surface area of the wall as a conduction path. Meaning that eventually you need a metal plate to bring all the current in to a power cable.
    But while you are conducting over the full area of the polymer sheet, you can stack the individual cells in series and so get a much higher voltage to build up your total power pack.
    This is much faster and cheaper than having self contained little 18650 cells each of which is welded to strips of nickel to link them together.
    However one advantage of having separate cells with welded to a strip connections is that the voltage, and often the current, in each cell can be monitored and if necessary adjusted by control circuitry to ensure that all the cells are charged and discharged in a controlled fashion that will give maximum battery life and safety. This control and monitoring is a big deal to abandon at this stage.

  2. I don’t understand the right diagram — where’s the circuit?
    The left-hand diagram obviously has a circuit, but where’s the circuit supposed to be on the right-hand diagram??

  6. That bit at the end seems off, isn’t it “APB licensed to Nissan in 2018” rather than the other way around?

    Or did Nissan develop it just for cars and APB wanted to scale it beyond and licensed for that purpose?

  8. The only additional information that I’ve found is that it will be “90% cheaper” and that it’s a bipolar battery. That’s it.

  10. What’s the $/kWh? And the kWh/kg? And kWh/L? And charging time? And number of recharges before it loses capacity? It’s frustrating to read battery stories that give no clues whether the battery is an improvement or not.

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