By Katie Merx, VP of Communications 

With our Endurion battery program making strides, the team at The Coretec Group is excited to be out and about soaking up everything we can about the electric vehicle industry and lithium-ion battery development. 

In the last few weeks, we’ve traveled to Nashville to participate in an EV and battery conference put on by Automotive News, sat in on a variety of battery and vehicle webinars, and attended a lecture by the Nobel Prize-winning father of the lithium-ion battery. This week, we have a presence at the Mackinac Policy Conference, a key networking event in our home state of Michigan. The event draws automotive executives and federal and state policymakers, including U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. 

What we’ve heard from a Nobel winner, battery analytics experts, the president of General Motors, and EV and battery chiefs from throughout the auto supply industry: The Coretec Group is headed in the right direction with our work to develop a silicon anode for lithium-ion batteries. 

Regardless of who we listen to or speak with, battery chemistry is at the leading edge of advancement for achieving the next advancements in performance, and the clear next step in battery advancement is silicon anodes.  

Silicon has the capacity to increase energy density, enable longer-running batteries, and eventually lower the cost of lithium-ion battery packs. 

The anode we’re developing in our Endurion program uses nanotechnology to engineer a solution to the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) issue that battery experts have encountered to date when trying to garner the potential 10-times greater lithium storage using silicon in battery anodes. The SEI layer issue reduces the charging capacity of a battery by 40% from the first charge-discharge cycle to the second cycle and is an acknowledged issue in the battery world for incorporating silicon into anodes. 

Our approach is different in a good way. We’re approaching the problem with expertise in engineered silicon to solve the battery challenge. Rather than try to avoid the problem, or work around it, our patent-pending technology aims to use nano-sized silicon molecules to engineer the SEI in a way that increases energy density while reaping the full potential of silicon to increase charging capacity. 

While our scientists are working hard to develop the anode and prototype batteries, the rest of us are digging in as hard as we can to make connections with the right potential partners, policymakers, decision-makers, collaborators, and customers. What we’re learning so far is very promising.