Domestic NCA ternary lithium battery gets into mass production. Will the scale application be far behind?

Under the pressure of subsidy policy adjustment, China's power battery technology route has changed.

Recently, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the "Recommended Models for Promotion and Application of New Energy Vehicles (3rd Batch in 2018)", and a total of 304 models were selected. Different from the previous one, in this batch of targets, the first pure electric passenger car equipped with NCA power battery appearing, which indicates that the domestic NCA battery has begun to be applied in electric vehicles.

It is understood that the use of NCA ternary lithium battery is the Baojun E100 under SAIC-GM-Wuling, with a cruising range of 250 kilometers and a battery system energy density of 142Wh/kg. The batteries are supplied by Tianpeng Power Supply and Huasheng Power manufactures battery packs.

Tianpeng Power said that the NCA battery provided this time uses the same technical system as the Japanese and Korean companies, namely NCA positive plus silicon carbon anode material.

In fact, NCA products have high technical content and are difficult to manufacture. High-energy density NCA ternary cylindrical lithium batteries are needed, and a lightweight battery pack system with perfect thermal management technology similar to that used by Tesla is needed. At present, the battery factories that supply NCA products to passenger cars in bulk are basically Japanese and Korean companies, such as Panasonic, Samsung and LG. There are only a handful of leading lithium battery companies in China that are trying to produce NCA lithium batteries for passenger cars.

At present, the three-way power battery produced by domestic power battery companies is basically based on the NCM523 system, and has begun to move toward NCM622 and NCM811. In the NCA power battery, it is basically in the early stage of research and development.

Objectively speaking, there are many factors in China's delay in mass production of NCA batteries. On the one hand, NCA is more demanding than NCM in terms of material production process. Due to the high technical barriers of NCA materials, the current production capacity is mainly concentrated in Japan and South Korea, and China's mass production is less.

On the other hand, from the point of view of the battery production process, the production of NCA batteries is more difficult. The main products that can produce NCA batteries around the world are Panasonic, Samsung and AESC, and NCM has many manufacturers, including LG and China's main power battery manufacturers.

On the whole, China's battery companies are still unable to produce NCA materials with high consistency, safety and stability. Even if they import mature NCA materials from Japan and South Korea, they will not be able to produce consistent and stable products on a large scale NCA battery.

However, as battery companies such as Tianpeng Power, Delangeng, and lishen battery successively mass-produced NCA batteries and began to load applications, it is expected that more Chinese battery companies will begin mass production of NCA batteries in the future, thereby reducing the number of batteries with Japan and South Korea the gap in technology.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.