UC Berkeley

The pursuit of scalable and manufacturable all-solid-state batteries continues to intensify, motivated by the rapidly increasing demand for safe, dense electrical energy storage. In this perspective, we describe the numerous, often conflicting implications of materials choices that have been made in the search for effective mitigations to the interfacial instabilities plaguing solid-state batteries. Specifically, we show that the manufacturing scalability of solid-state batteries can be governed by at least three principal consequences of materials selection: (1) the availability, scaling capacity, and price volatility of the chosen materials’ constituents, (2) the manufacturing processes needed to integrate the chosen materials into full cells, and (3) the cell performance that may be practically achieved with the chosen materials and processes. While each of these factors is, in isolation, a pivotal determinant of manufacturing scalability, we show that consideration and optimization of their collective effects and trade-offs is necessary to more completely chart a scalable pathway to manufacturing. With examples pulled from recent developments in solid-state batteries, we illustrate the consequences of materials choice on materials availability, processing requirements and challenges, and resultant device performance. We demonstrate that while each of these factors is, by itself, essential to understanding manufacturing scalability, joint consideration of all three provides for a more comprehensive understanding of the specific factors that could impede the scale up to production. Much of the recent activity in solid-state battery research has been aimed at mitigating the various interfacial instabilities that currently prevent the fabrication of a low-cost, high-performance device. With such a wide breadth of options, it can be difficult for researchers to identify the most promising or scalable pathways forward. As such, we aim to empower researchers to make more informed decisions by providing them with insights into how their materials choices are likely to impact the manufacturing scalability of different interfacial mitigation alternatives. In doing so, we hope that generalizable lessons about scalability can be extracted and applied to subsequent challenges in solid-state battery development, thereby accelerating their scale up to manufacturing. In the design of solid-state batteries, a considerable range of materials is under investigation for both the solid electrolyte as well as for mitigations to the numerous interfacial instabilities that hamper device performance. The choices made for these material and device design decisions have many, often conflicting, effects on manufacturing scalability. By modeling example cells reported in the literature, we show that collective evaluation of these trade-offs is imperative to accurately assess potential barriers to manufacturing scale up.