Extremely fast charging, non-flammable, ten times longer life: Empa spin-off wants to bring solid-state battery to market

Under the name »BTRY« (pronounced »battery«), researchers of the »Thin Films and Photovoltaics« laboratory at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research Empa want to bring a lithium metal-based solid-state battery to market. Abdessalem Aribia and Moritz Futscher, along with lab head Yaroslav Romanyuk, founded the company after years of joint research.
The principle of the so-called thin-film solid-state battery has been known since the 1980s, but one of the main problems is the low capacity of the very thin battery cells. According to an Empa release, Futscher and Aribia have »succeeded in stacking the thin-film cells on top of each other, increasing their capacity.« This makes the technology »promising for commercial applications,« especially because it has enormous advantages, at least potentially, over the lithium-ion batteries that dominate today: A thin-film solid-state battery can be charged and discharged within a minute, its lifespan is about ten times longer, it is insensitive to temperature fluctuations, and it is nonflammable.
Various institutions have already provided help with start-up funding. BTRY now wants to develop larger examples as quickly as possible based on the battery cells, which are still very small in the meantime, »in order to show potential investors that the technology is worth backing.«
© PHOTON