Volkswagen Battery Chemistry Technologies
According to Volkswagen's roadmap, revealed on 2021 Volkswagen's Power Day, the company plans to establish six battery factories in Europe with the capacity of 40 GWh of lithium-ion batteries every year, creating over 20000 jobs and bringing in over 20 billion Euros annually. One of them, with an investment of 2 billion Euros, will start producing by 2025 in Salzgitter. This plant is expected to provide batteries for about half a million electric vehicles.
This article is a BattScout's review of Volkswagen's battery chemistry technologies. Since early 2000, Volkswagen has been developing battery chemistry. Its patent portfolio has continued to expand since 2015, after declining R&D activities from 2012 to 2014.
The Volkswagen patent portfolio is dominated by five technologies: Lithium-air, Lithium-sulfur, cathode materials, silicon anode, and solid-state battery. Only three patents were filed on lithium-air technology between 2010 and 2012, and no additional patents have been registered since then.
There are also developed chemistry types, such as lithium-sulfur batteries, which benefit electric vehicles. Since sulfur has a low atomic weight, it provides a great deal of specific energy density, which helps battery manufacturers achieve the required goals of EVs.
Despite these batteries' advantages, no critical metals such as nickel or cobalt are used in their structure. Lithium-sulfur batteries suffer from a short lifetime because of the leakage of the cathode's active material. Lithium-sulfur battery patents were registered from 2011 to 2016. The registration rate declined after 2014 until 2016, when it completely stopped. The other three technologies, ternary cathode materials, silicon anode, and solid-state battery (lithium metal anode), are Volkswagen's recent interests which occurred an inclining trend in the number of their patents. The solid-state battery has been dominant in the last five years, while silicon anode patents have been published since 2007. In 2021, the company mentioned silicon anodes and solid-state batteries in its roadmap to be the main chemistry in future years.
