New energy car explosion growth

Since 2014, new energy vehicles have continued to be released, and production and sales have increased significantly. In the first half of 2016, the production and sales of new energy vehicles were 177,000 vehicles and 170,000 vehicles, an increase of 125.0 % and 126.9 % respectively. Among them, the production and sales of pure electric vehicles completed 134,000 vehicles and 126,000 vehicles, respectively, an increase of 160.8 % and 161.6 % over the same period last year; The production and sales of plug-in hybrid vehicles completed 43,000 and 44,000 vehicles, respectively, an increase of 57.1 % and 64.2 % over the same period last year.

The continuous expansion of demand in the market for new energy vehicles has driven the release of automobile powered lithium battery production capacity. The choice of battery materials has increasingly become a topic of concern to the industry. From the point of view of lithium battery material and core, positive electrode material is the core material of lithium battery. It not only determines the development direction of lithium batteries, but also determines the safety performance and energy density of batteries. In addition, positive materials account for more than 40 % of battery costs, so it also determines the cost of lithium batteries.

The lithium battery positive electrode materials that have been commercialized include lithium cobalt acid, lithium manganese acid, lithium iron phosphate and ternary materials. The main power batteries used in domestic new energy vehicles are mainly lithium iron phosphate and ternary materials. Due to the late start of ternary materials in China, lithium-ion batteries in new energy vehicles in our country mainly use lithium-iron phosphate technology, but lithium-phosphate batteries have low energy density and poor low-temperature performance, resulting in poor endurance of new energy vehicles. Therefore, the application of lithium-iron phosphate batteries has certain limitations. With the increasing demand of battery energy density for electric vehicles, lithium batteries with higher energy density of ternary materials have begun to become mainstream and are considered to be the future development trend of batteries. In fact, foreign car companies such as Tesla have long begun to use ternary lithium batteries.

The author has checked the battery types of new energy vehicles on the market, and 33 of the 49 models use ternary material lithium batteries. For example, Beiqi New Energy's EV200 and EV300 adopts a ternary lithium battery produced by its cooperation with South Korea's SK. The SAIC Rongwei E50 uses a ternary lithium battery produced by LG Chemical, Zhidou D2 uses a pool of ternary lithium batteries such as polyfluoride.

BYD is a representative of the lithium iron phosphate battery. BYD E5, E6, Qin EV300, and plug-in hybrid versions of Qin, Tang, and Tengshi EV all use lithium iron phosphate batteries.

Some analyses have pointed out that lithium ore and iron oxide phosphate reserves are abundant in China, and the manufacture of lithium iron phosphate batteries has advantages. However, in China, there is a shortage of cobalt ore, so it is difficult to manufacture lithium ternary batteries. Therefore, some car companies insist on the development of lithium iron phosphate batteries.

However, in order to improve the shortcomings of lithium iron phosphate battery, BYD President Wang Chuanfu has revealed that he has increased the energy density by adding manganese to lithium iron phosphate, and BYD's new model has begun to use ternary lithium batteries.

New Energy Car Outbreak Growth ternary lithium battery Becomes Mainstream

Some research reports show that the theoretical capacity of lithium iron phosphate battery is 170mAh/g in battery capacity, while the theoretical capacity of lithium cobalt nickel manganese oxide ternary lithium battery can reach 280mAh/g, which is 64% more than the former. This means that under the same conditions, the new energy vehicle using the ternary lithium battery can theoretically run 60% more than the lithium iron phosphate new energy vehicle.

However, due to the weakness of ternary lithium cells, because ternary lithium cells need to be combined with a large number of individual cells, the size of the battery pack is very large. Although it is better than lithium iron phosphate batteries in terms of power output, it has to be lost. Space is at the expense of the car. Moreover, the price of ternary materials is also much more expensive than lithium iron phosphate.

Based on the current trend, domestic new-energy car companies are more inclined to triple lithium batteries. They seem to value the higher energy density of triple lithium batteries. It is enough to see that improving the range of new energy vehicles is an urgent task for car companies.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.