Introduction of high nickel ternary battery

At present, the development of power lithium batteries is undergoing a revolution.

Before 2017, the market chose lithium iron phosphate battery as the mainstream of technology, and the demand for battery energy density of new energy vehicles is a process of continuous improvement, and the industry will continue to change choices.

The upper limit of energy density of lithium iron phosphate battery is about 160Wh/kg. The industry expects that the energy density standard of power battery will reach 300Wh/kg or more by 2020, which is difficult to achieve.

On the other hand, the actual average energy density of the ternary battery at the current technical level can reach between 180-190Wh/kg, and there is also a large room for improvement in the subsequent stage.

The policy aspect is also overweight. In February of this year, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the National Development and Reform Commission issued a document to adjust the financial subsidy policy for new energy vehicles, and improved the energy density threshold for pure electric passenger cars, non-fast charge pure electric buses, and special vehicle power battery systems. Claim.

It is expected that the ternary battery will catch up with the market capacity of lithium iron phosphate in the mainstream this year, and will continue to adopt incremental replacement in the future market.

High nickel ternary capacity layout and mass production schedule

Specific to the field of ternary battery cathode materials, high nickel materials have the advantage of higher energy density. Secondly, according to calculations, after using high-nickel materials, the overall unit cost of the battery has dropped by up to about 8%, and the cost advantage is obvious.

The fluctuation in cobalt prices brought about by the contradiction between supply and demand is also helping manufacturers to shift to low-cobalt and high-nickel products. The cost of cobalt raw materials in ternary cathode materials is relatively high, and its price continues to rise in 2018, compared with the initial price of 520,000 Yuan/ton in the first quarter, and the increase rate in April exceeded 20%. As of April 13, cobalt price has reached 674,400 Yuan / ton.

Under the demand of cost reduction and efficiency increase, the high-nickel ternary NCM811 product with the most advantageous support for the aforementioned 300Wh/kg target debuted with a halo.

Although there are still manufacturers claiming that the lithium iron phosphate battery line will remain unwavering, the market for higher energy density battery technology is being actively promoted. Since 2017, domestic cathode material manufacturers have successively laid out high-nickel products. These production capacities are expected to be supplied to the market in 2018. In particular, the production capacity and output of NCM811 products are highly regarded.

For domestic power battery companies, CATL, BYD, Jiangxi Fu Neng, BAK Battery , Guoxuan Hi-Tech, Tianjin Lishen, Penghui Energy and other companies have developed and produced NCM811 batteries. Among them, BAK Battery has announced that it has mass-produced NCM811 cylindrical power battery, the energy density can reach 232Wh/kg, and the product called 300Wh/kg will soon be available. Penghui Energy also revealed that the company's cylindrical batteries using NCM811 materials have been mass-produced and supplied to the relevant OEMs.

Several major constraints on accelerating the volume

Although it is generally optimistic, there is still a long way to go to realize the large-scale application of high-nickel NCM811 products in the field of automotive power batteries. At present, there are only a few cases in which NCM811 products are used in new energy vehicles.

In October last year, the Jianghuai iEV7S, which participated in the National Production Car Performance Competition, was equipped with a battery of 18650-2.75Ah, which became the first case of domestic NCM811 products applied to new energy vehicles.

Internationally, Hyundai recently released the KonaEV pure electric SUV, which is equipped with the NCM811 battery provided by LG Chem, but the model has not yet been mass-produced.

At this stage, there are still the following bottlenecks in accelerating the application of high-nickel products:

Raw materials are scarce. China's lithium, cobalt and nickel resources are relatively scarce. Domestic high-nickel raw materials are mainly imported at this stage, which is easily affected by external factors. With the growth of the power battery industry, experts believe that lithium, cobalt and nickel will be in short supply in 2021, 2022 and 2019 respectively.

Manufacturing capacity constraints: The production process of high-nickel ternary materials is complicated, and the production equipment and environment are highly demanded. The existing production lines cannot be directly applied as NCM811 or NCA production lines, and need to be redesigned and constructed, and a large amount of capital investment is required. It can be said that there is currently no mature preparation technology and large-scale batch production capacity in China and even a certain amount of capacity shortage will occur in the next three years.

Security issues are waiting to be resolved. According to Yulong Zhu, deputy chief engineer of Shanghai Jiexin Power Engineering Department, the higher the nickel ratio, the worse the thermal stability of the cathode material. In the case of high temperature, external impact, etc., high nickel batteries may present a safety hazard. And the gas generated when the high-nickel battery is charged will cause the battery to bulge, which is also a problem to be solved. As a key component in automotive products, high-nickel products still require a greater degree of safety in terms of safety.

Equipment selection cycle is long. Vehicle enterprises are very cautious about the application of new technologies and new products in vehicle models. Major automobile enterprises have strict and complicated certification procedures for battery suppliers, and battery enterprises and products need to undergo high degree of testing and verification, which takes a long time.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.