NVX, SVX, NANO - Who sounds more advanced?From the excerpt below, who sounds more advanced, Novonix, Slyvatex, or Nano One?
Instead of recycling sulfates, several firms are trying to avoid them altogether with technologies that make battery materials without generating sulfate waste.
The battery start-ups Novinix, Sylvatex, and Nano One hope to produce nickel, manganese, and cobalt cathode materials from metal oxides or hydroxides, rather than sulfates. Sylvatex CEO Virginia Klausmeier argues that sulfate-free manufacturing processes will make it easier to build large plants in places with strict environmental regulations.
“You don’t have any sodium sulfate waste,” she says. “That completely mitigates the environmental issue that is becoming an increasingly big thorn in the growth of cathode manufacturing in Europe and North America.”
Metal sulfates are soluble, and can be mixed relatively easily, in water. But metal oxides and hydroxides usually aren’t soluble in water, which makes them hard to combine uniformly.
Sylvatex and Nano One overcome this challenge with additives that encourage metal hydroxides to combine homogeneously. Novonix uses heat and mechanical force to mix the materials. “We’ve developed techniques to combine these materials, break them down, and then rebuild them,” says Chris Burns, CEO of Novonix.
These start-ups all claim that their processes will lower the cost of cathode manufacturing once they are scaled up, but they have yet to build commercial plants.