Japanese government and enterprises will work together to develop all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries

According to Japan Economic News, the Japanese government will work with private enterprises to promote the development of new generation pure electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Beginning in May, the Ministry of Economy and Industry of Japan will cooperate with Toyota, Asahikawa, Panasonic and other automotive, material, electronic and mechanical enterprises to promote the development of high-efficiency all-solid-state batteries. At present, Japan is being seized market share by Chinese enterprises in the mainstream automobile battery field. With a view to the formal popularization of pure electric vehicles, Japan will accelerate the development of new generation batteries to achieve counter-offensive.

Japan's Ministry of Economy and Industry will invest 1.6 billion yen to the lithium battery Materials Evaluation and Research Center (LIBTEC), a Technical Research Association joined by material manufacturers Asahi Cheng and Toray. Toyota, Nissan, Honda and other large automobile companies, as well as Panasonic, GSYUASA (Jasper Soup Shallow) and other battery manufacturers will also join the development of LIBTEC.

At present, the mainstream electrolyte of lithium batteries is liquid, while all-solid batteries use solid electrolyte. There is no need to worry about leakage, safety is improved, and easy to assemble. Due to the reduction of components required for all-solid-state batteries, not only can the cost be reduced, but also the output power can be increased.

In the field of all-solid-state batteries, Toyota's research is considered to be the most advanced in the world, but it has not yet been practical. Therefore, enterprises from automotive, battery to material industries will build a cooperation framework to accelerate research and development. Solid materials that are more difficult to use than liquids will be used in batteries, promoting the development of improved performance and formulating safety assessment standards.

The average range of a car carrying existing lithium batteries is about 400 kilometers. LIBTEC aims to increase its range to 550 kilometers by 2025 and 800 kilometers by 2030. All solid state batteries are expected to be adopted by many enterprises.

In the automotive battery industry, Japanese enterprises are in the forefront, accounting for 70% of the market share in 2013. However, Chinese and Korean companies are catching up fast. In 2013, Chinese companies with a market share of only 3% expanded to 26% by 2016, while Japanese companies decreased to 41%.

Affected by the global environmental restrictions, pure electric vehicles will be formally popularized in the future. China plans to increase the number of new generation cars from 650,000 in 2016 to 80 million, and Germany plans to increase from 70,000 to 6 million. Japan plans to expand the proportion of new generation vehicles in new car sales to 20-30% by 2030. It is expected that the market scale of battery, the core component of pure electric vehicles, will also increase substantially.

Japan's Ministry of Economy and Industry will promote the development of international standards in order to grasp the global dominance of on-board batteries. Specifically, applications to the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) were discussed.

Japan will speed up its response from two aspects of technology development and standard-setting to improve the sense of existence of Japanese enterprises in the pure electric vehicle market.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.