Improving battery performance and life

      Safe-Li, an Arizona State University (ASU) startup, has licensed groundbreaking fire-resistant lithium-ion and lithium-metal battery technology and received a funding boost to further validate its research.

Safe-Li, which has an exclusive technology commercialization license from ASU technology transfer partner Skysong Innovations, facilitated the commercialization and patent process, and the company was accepted into Shell's GameChanger program and received $300,000 in seed funding. GameChanger helps startups come up with unproven, early-stage ideas that have the potential to impact the future of energy. Safe-Li will have the support and expertise of the GameChanger team, but will remain independent and autonomous in making decisions.

Arizona State University Regent Professor Jerry Lin, the inventor of the technology and lead scientist of Safe-Li, has developed the patent-pending technology that promises to revolutionize the battery industry and make it safer. He has created a unique coating method that will add a step and increased safety to current battery manufacturing. These technologies also improve battery performance and life by three to five times at higher charge and discharge rates.

Jerry Lin's team will use the seed fund further study, as a coin battery, similar to the battery for keys. Once the science is proven, Safe-Li can begin to test it on multilayer bag batteries and seek co-innovation partners from battery manufacturers. Initial validation is expected to be completed within 12 months.

The technology will improve the safety of electric vehicles, energy storage plants and further the transition to renewable energy. Once industrialized and scaled, the technology will provide safe high-performance lithium-ion batteries for a variety of energy storage applications. In addition, the platform technology Jerry Lin's team is developing can also be expanded to produce higher energy density lithium metal batteries, which will have a significant impact on the development of long life batteries for electric vehicles."