NCA Cathode material testing for Recyclico - TeslaIn today's news release, AMY said that NCA cathode material testing has begun. NMC chemistry cathode materials are apparently common, while NCA chemistry cathode materials are less common.
On the site MDPI.COM, I found a paper titled "Current Li-Ion Battery Technologies in Electric Vehicles and Opportunities for Advancements" which was published March 20, 2019 and co-authored by Yu Miao, Patrick Hynan, Annette von Jouanne and Alexandre Yokochi. Of interest is the following excerpt:
2.1.6. Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminum Oxide (Li(NixCoyAl1−x−y)O2) Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminum Oxide (NCA) has been around since 1999 for special applications. It shares similarities with NMC by offering high specific energy and specific power (the rate at which the battery can deliver energy), and a long life span [20]. NCA is not as safe as the others listed above and as such, require special safety monitoring measures to be employed for use in EVs. They are also more costly to manufacture, limiting their viability for use in other applications [44]. So far, Tesla is known as the only EV manufacturer who uses NCA chemistry, and claims their NCA battery in production has even less Cobalt than NMC811. The NCA batteries used in the Tesla Model 3 and the first Model S in 2012 had only 15% Cobalt content [45,46].
Here's the link: file:///C:/Users/KD/Downloads/energies-12-01074.pdf DYODD.