Karthik Ramaswami - Duracell

SPEAKER_04 0:00

So when you get these electrodes from TDK, the first thing we do is put them into worm cells, do the high temperature testing, do some of the safety testing, and boy, they failed. I mean they were blowing up left, right, and center.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

And I'm Kevin Eberman. Welcome to Battery Potential. Kevin? Vincent. Today we're lucky to have a true industry pioneer join us, Karthik Ramaswamy. Karthik Ramaswamy is the chief technical officer at Cyanic Energy. His career started at Duracell in the 90s, not only working on primary cells, but spearheading lithium-ion development. He then had leadership positions at Eagle Pitcher and Integer in the world of batteries for medical devices. He has consistently been at the nexus of emerging battery technologies, laboratory scale optimization, and high-volume manufacturing. It's a pleasure to have you here to share the early days of your journey in the world of batteries and to understand. If Duracel was working on lithium-ion batteries in the 90s, why aren't they anymore? Welcome, Karthik.

SPEAKER_04 1:27

Thank you, Winston. Thank you, Kevin. It's a pleasure. You guys are doing a great job, by the way. This is a very interesting. I think uh you know most of us just sort of take it as it comes and we forget about the past, except a few times when you have something that triggers an old memory. But uh, it's nice to capture some of this history. And I had a fantastic time listening to Jeff Don and Gauthier earlier. I can't fill those shoes, but I think what I'm going to talk about will be probably more applied engineering and you know development than you know fundamental materials. But yeah, let's take it where this goes.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Let's dive in. So you joined Duracell in 1990. Is that correct? Where were you coming from and how did you end up there?

SPEAKER_04 2:11

Yeah, maybe I'll take it a little step further

Beginnings in Electrochemistry

SPEAKER_04 2:14

back. So I started my career in electrochemistry actually during my masters, um, working on desulfurization of coal using electrochemistry. So this was in Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. A lot of coal in southern Illinois, a lot of sulfur in the coal. And there was this professor who had this idea of using electrochemistry in an ecosystem to remove sulfur from the coal. So that was my very first exposure to electrochemistry. So I literally had to learn fundamentals of electrochemistry, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then using these acidic media in cold slurries to remove sulfur. Anyway, that was my first exposure to electrochemistry, and I found it quite fascinating. And so when it came time for me to go ahead and look for a place where I could do a PhD, I started looking at universities that had an electrochemical program, but I also wanted to be involved with something that was very practical because I always wanted to be close to a product rather than science for the sake of science. And um, you know, I came across this uh professor at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago working on high-temperature fuel cells. And energy storage had always fascinated me. I kind of grew up in the 60s and the 70s in India, and I remember the oil crisis and the fact that, you know, many countries in Asia were struggling with adequate electricity, uh, adequate power to do anything. And so that was an area that always fascinated me. I'm originally a chemical engineer by training or undergrad. And so this was an area that always was of interest. So when uh when I saw this opportunity, I wrote to the professor and I reached out to him and said, hey, I'm really interested in doing this. And fortunately, he was funded uh by the Electric Power Research Institute. And before you knew it, I was in Chicago doing my starting my PhD, working on high temperature

Molten Salt Fuel Cells

SPEAKER_04 4:14

fuel cells. And this was molten carbonate back in the 80s, mid-80s. So molten carbonate fuel cells, and I focused on um, you know, really mass transport properties of uh molten carbonates at what 700, 800 degrees Celsius. And the task at hand was to build a rotating disk electrode to do mass transport studies at 800 degrees Celsius. Ouch. Wow, hard. Yes. Um long story short, but that was, you know, those are long experiments, right? Between starting up the experiment, melting the salt, getting it to stability, making sure that you didn't have a power loss anywhere in the middle that it was two months before you started getting any data out of your cells. Um but that was that was quite an experience in every respect, you know, learning how to do things, how to make things, how to build this furnace with parts, how to, you know, I used to go to a gold goldsmith in Chicago to help cast this gold electrode for me. You couldn't buy a gold electrode, rotating disc electrode, right, from uh pine instruments. It was quite quite a learning experience, uh, you know, getting to figure things out when nobody had done something before like this.

SPEAKER_03 5:27

So uh did you did you take then classes in electrochemistry? I asked people. It seems like so many battery people, well, me included, never took a class in electrochemistry and had to just learn it on the side on their own.

SPEAKER_04 5:40

I I would say I learned most of it on my own. But yes, I did I did take a couple of uh electrochemical engineering classes. Um my professor was uh an ex-Berkeley guy. He had a graduate level class in electrochemistry, electrochemical engineering, it was called. So, so yes, we did that. Obviously, chemical engineering, so you do you're studying mass transport and you know kinetics and things like that. So I did get a pretty good foundation later on. Reading the basic books of electrochemistry, you know, was where you learned most of your you know fundamentals.

unknown 6:12

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Yeah, it's interesting. So you you you really had a kind of a grounded desire to go into energy storage. You saw that at a societal level, and then when you went into it, it was extremely applied where right off the bat, it was fabrication and learning how to really make these systems work.

SPEAKER_04 6:30

Yes, yes, absolutely was. And you know, I guess I've always been the kind of a guy who liked to build things with my hands. So I was laughing when I heard Jeff Dante says he was the he was the brain and I was the doer or something like that. Yeah. You know, yeah, and I think in in in in some respects, you know, I I feel like I'm that kind of a person. I'm very hands-on. And I think there are these incidents in your lives or your experiences that uh push you in a certain direction, and before you know it, it becomes your career. And then before you know it, you've been in it for what, 35 years now? Um and I've I've loved every every every piece of it, every part of it through all these

Why Batteries Not Fuel Cells

SPEAKER_04 7:08

years. So, you know, from this high temperature molten salt electrochemistry, I still wanted to stay in the area, but there were two things I knew I didn't want to do. One was constantly looking for funding that my professor had to do in grad school, right? Which means we were doing the same thing, right? Writing these proposals because everything was a one-year contract. And we had students from Japan that used, you know, we had a collaboration with Tohoku University in Japan, where we would have a couple of Japanese researchers spend a year with us in Chicago. And those guys never had to worry about funding. They had, you know, their Moonlight project or whatever, it's like a 15-year project on fuel cells and energy that was mandated and funded by the government.

SPEAKER_01 7:55

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 7:56

Right? And so, and here I was with our professor every year. Before your project is half done, you're already writing your proposals for next year's funding. And I decided that was not something that I wanted to continue doing. And fuel cell was going to be that way. There's very few companies doing fuel cell development. I didn't see myself in a fuel cell company for the rest of my career. And so I looked at adjacent industries and uh you know it was battery companies.

SPEAKER_03 8:24

And I ended up at Durasell. I'm guessing that you thought yourself. Wait, you said you said you wanted to do things that were really practical uh and product oriented. At what point did you think maybe maybe the uh this high temperature fuel cell you were working on was not so uh product oriented?

SPEAKER_04 8:38

Yeah, so it was a couple of things, right? What I just said about the fact that most of the fuel cell work in the US uh was at the mercy of the administration that was in office, right? Whether you you funded the Department of Energy or you didn't, whether energy efficiency and alternate sources of energy were important or not, that to some degree is still the case. But it seemed much worse then. The other thing that made me move away from that particular field was frankly a strange incident where we lost power. And my entire experiment that had started two months earlier and I hadn't started taking data yet was completely destroyed. So you have to imagine these are large furnaces with ceramic tubes. It's all made of aluminum oxide because that's what is stable in molten lithium and potassium carbonates. And so this entire thing just froze and broke, right? When you lost power. And they went, you know, two and a half months of work, right? And now you have to start over. And so that was another trigger that told me, you know, I probably don't want to be working on high temperature things after this. Uh when batteries were perfect.

SPEAKER_03 9:50

Yeah, and it shows the general problem, right? Of a high temperature. Exactly. Exactly.

Joining Duracell R&D

SPEAKER_00 9:56

So out of the PhD, you get hired into Duracell. What do you think you'll be working on at Duracell?

SPEAKER_04 10:03

Interesting question, yes. Um Do you know what they want you to do? Duracell, well, they had it was just RD, right? We were, you know, it was an RD organization. Uh the details were not shared at the time, but I did know that they were working on lithium batteries. But then being a battery company, they had Zincair, they had alkaline cells, of course, which was the bread and butter of the company. Uh, and they were lithium primary batteries that Duracell made uh for those photocameras, those point and shoot cameras, mostly. Right. And um, those were small cylindrical cells called the two-third A size. Um short, stubby, you know, double A's call it. Um, and so the RD organization worked on all these different chemistries. Once I started, since I didn't have battery experience anyway, it really didn't matter if you think about it. Um, and I was just happy enough to not not having to be working on you know high temperature things, and here my experiment could happen in a day. Think about it. Right.

SPEAKER_03 11:04

Yes, the rate of learning will be so high.

SPEAKER_04 11:06

Yeah, exactly. I mean, think of how much more you can produce you know in a day compared to high temperature fuel

Launching the Li-ion Battery Program

SPEAKER_04 11:12

cells. So um, but I ended up in being one of the probably the third or the fourth higher um into the lithium ion, a brand new lithium ion project, development project at uh Duracell. So this was 1990, right? So we were just starting a lithium ion project internally. You gotta remember Duracell had been building lithium primary cells, like I just said, and that was the old SANEO uh lithium manganese dioxide technology that had been licensed. So it was similar chemistry, and then Duracell, of course, was doing, you know, making improvements to the design and some of the materials and the processes to make it more efficient or improve performance or high rate, etc. etc. But fundamentally it was the SANEO technology that Duracell had. So there was a history of non-equeous lithium-based, lithium metal-based chemistry knowledge in the company, right? There was a factory in uh in North Carolina that was making these batteries, and there was an RD organization in Needham, Massachusetts, which is where I started, that did the research and development for those lithium primary cells. We even had a cell assembly group that could make wound cells back then, right? So even before the early 90s. And um, but these were MnO2 cathodes with the with lithium metal. But you know, these were homemade winders.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

The the MNO2 cells were wound.

SPEAKER_04 12:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 12:41

Yes, these were wounded high rate.

SPEAKER_04 12:44

Yeah, exactly, for the cameras. And uh they used triflate electrolyte, LITFS, uh, I think it was like PC DME solvent and some additives, of course, here and there. But they're pretty funny. Yeah, they were fairly thick electrodes, and they were electrodes on an expanded metal grid. Right. So there was no foil coating those days, it was metal grid. You know, every company had later on I realized after moving out of a Duracell and working at Rayovac and other companies, every company has their own sort of secret little approach to making electrodes and processing, including the formulation and including the solvent sometimes. Um so without going into the details of the Duracell process for obvious reasons, uh, it was a process that used PTFE. PTFE was the binder in a lot of these electrodes, whether it was zinc air, whether it was lithium MNO2, or even lithium-CFX, which I later on encountered on medical batteries. Right? So PTFE is a standard thing here. So so yeah, cylindrical cells. So there was a little lab that actually could make cylindrical cells, but nobody had experience with lithium ion.

SPEAKER_03 13:58

Remember, I just want to I just want to interject so the listener may not realize that very recently this uh all-dry electrode thing has been kicked off by Tesla, which of course is using PTFE. Yes, and like how do you do it? How do you deliver it all dry in there? And that's what you were doing.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

And then PTFE acts as a binder through fibrillation, where the polymer under shear forms little fibers, which was a technology borrowed from capacitors, right?

SPEAKER_04 14:24

Yes. Dupont and Gore, WL Gore have are the experts on fibrillating PTFE.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

Right, right. Uh for a little study for a set of LinkedIn threads, I was comparing battery chemistries and I purchased a two-thirds double-A like you're describing. And the construction is still the same. A thick MNO2 electrode with lithium foil and on expanded metal. It has not changed.

SPEAKER_04 14:47

Well, it works great, right? I mean, why would you change it? And and you know, it's it's relatively inexpensive to make, and so uh so yeah, it stayed there.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

But now Duracell, this is 1990. The lithium ion battery has not been commercialized yet. Sony hasn't released its lithium ion cells. There has not been any commercial lithium ion batteries sold. But somebody at Duracell has already realized this is important. So they have their pulse on the on the research, it appears.

SPEAKER_04 15:15

Yes, absolutely. No, no, you have to remember back in the late 80s and early 90s, Duracell was probably the biggest battery company in the world. Think about it. They were bigger than Sony and Panasonic, the battery divisions. And those companies were mostly focused on lithium. Yes, they had some Alkaline, but Duracell was the biggest Alkaline battery company in the world. And Alkaline batteries were the dominant cell, consumer cell at the time. Energizer was a close second, but these are the two companies in the US that were leaders, right, in batteries. And they both had lithium programs as well, right? And so they had to always stay on top of what was happening in the industry because that was their bread and butter. So you have marketing groups and business development and all that that make sure that you are aware of the threats as well as the opportunities in front of you. Yes. And I think the view was this was either a threat or an opportunity, but regardless, we have to look at it, right? We have to invest in it and we have to understand it. And if it's an opportunity, we want to be the first one, then we want to be the leaders, like we have been in Apple and Batteries. Um and so I that probably was the motivation. But yes, there was enough of a motivation, enough of an understanding of this opportunity or threat that a significant effort and a lot of money was put into developing lithium-ion. Initially understanding it and then actually working to scale it.

SPEAKER_03 16:43

What scale did you uh take it to while you were there?

SPEAKER_04 16:46

Duracell took it up to a pilot scale,

Reverse Engineering Sony Cells

SPEAKER_04 16:49

right? But but initially, between 1990 and say 1993, we were developing the technology internally using. I gotta talk a little bit about this. There was not enough information on lithium ion, right? You're talking about 1990, 91. There were a lot of Japanese laid-open patents. They call them the kokai, Japanese kokai, which had to be translated. And so we had a team of translators that were on our apparel that would translate these articles and these publications, uh, not granted patents, but these were publications that we would be learning about these materials that people were using. You know, what was Mitsubishi Peach Coke was the material that was that was the anode material of choice. Jeff Don talked about you know the carbon, right? There was no graphite at the time for lithium ion, so a lot of it was a hard carbon. And of course, the Sony cell came out. Um, and the first thing we did was, you know, we we bought a camcorder and took it apart, right? Of course. So you know you you know you have a pretty good analytical lab, so you you know do the reverse engineering and you'll you know take a look at that battery, like, oh my goodness, look at this. It's on foil, it's on copper, it's on aluminum, it's on this, it's on that. Um, so that was quite an experience because you're trying to basically reverse engineer something, understand it, and then putting the pieces together by reading all of these patterns and the few articles that started to come out on the later in the 90s. But it was a very interesting time where we were trying to understand corrosion of aluminum, right? At these high voltages. Um, and and what was the in fact, one of my early projects was to figure out to help figure out what solvent combination and what salt to use here that would not corrode the aluminum. That's the most important thing. But now, what kind of aluminum, what what grade of aluminum are we talking about here? Because a lot of the aluminum foils had some alloying materials, and then there was the temper of the of the aluminum, the heat treatment. All of that affected the corrosion behavior, right? Yeah, um, and so it was literally starting from the very fundamentals at an engineering level of what are the materials, how stable are they, what are the potentials they're you know, stable at, what salts affect this corrosion and stability, right? Because most companies use TFS, lithium TFS as a salt in MNO2 cells. Well, there's no way that would work with aluminum because you know it corrodes aluminum right there, about 3 or 3.2. And so it took a while, but luckily uh there was LIPF6 available, but we had to purify the salts, the solvents internally. So we had a whole fancy little glove box, and this one guy sitting there, he would purify the solvents and he would formulate the electrolytes for us. You couldn't order you know finished electrolyte easily back then. It is it started happening, but uh in the very early days we we formulated our own electrolytes.

SPEAKER_03 19:50

Did he have to take water out of the electrolyte or absolutely?

SPEAKER_04 19:54

Yeah, absolutely. That was a huge, huge part of that.

SPEAKER_03 19:57

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

So in the early, you know, 90 to 93, are you making coin cells? What's the combination is typically LCO uh like lithium cobalt oxide with hard carbon?

SPEAKER_04 20:08

Absolutely.

From Coin Cells to Wound Cells

SPEAKER_04 20:09

So so it was Dr. Blade electrodes, right? We all learn how to do the doctor blade coating of uh uh uh LCO with all the different different carbon blacks, right? You know, the the conductive carbons and the graphites, the the KS6 and the SFG6s of this world, the flake graphites.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

And and really they had those brand names already. They did, they're still used today.

SPEAKER_04 20:32

Because some of those, and again, a lot of those were used in MNO2 cells, right? In MNO2 cathodes. So, you know, there was yeah, KS6 and SFG6 are materials I remember from the very early, early days of lithium ion. Um, but yeah, we would use coin cells, but very quickly we realized that coin cells didn't perform very well if you're trying to do cycling.

SPEAKER_03 20:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 20:59

So um we immediately or very quickly uh resorted to the cylindrical wound cells that I was telling you we could make. And uh there the initial problem, of course, was it was used to a grid electrode, right? Not a foil. And and this was a little homemade you know thing in the mechanical shop. It was a homemade winder that our machine shop built together. And slowly we we graduated to uh foil-based electrodes, but that took a while because that process took a while for us to develop uh to get the adhesion, you know, to get the uh cohesion between particles, not to have it crack when you're winding it. A lot of a lot of engineering and very little data, right? Very little prior experience and knowledge. But we but we got there. In fact, our grid electrodes performed very well. I remember this. You might get a kick out of this. So the uh the grid the grid electrodes use PTFE T30. Which is that suspension with some surfactant in it. And we would use a pasta maker. This was a sort of a fabric that went between rolls, and you would lay this dough of PTFE alcohol-based paste or dough with the carbon in the active material. And it would just roll it into this thing into a sheet, you know, on top of grid, right? So that was how we initially started making our electrodes in-house, right? And then slowly graduated to foil, which took a while because figuring out the solvent, figuring out that whole process and the mixing process, completely different equipment from anything we'd used before that you would use for the dough process with PTFE. And so that took probably a year or more for us to really hone in on how best to do this. But eventually we got it. And we graduated to, of course, dozens and dozens of these cylindrical two-thirds A cells for all the testing, and we had some really good performance. I was very proud, and the team was very proud of what we were able to do. Well, you just talk about the team. How big is this team? Give me a picture of like what's going on here.

Scaling Up a Pilot Line

SPEAKER_04 23:12

So again, DuraCell, right? So this is an established battery company already. So it had all the processes in place, and we got ISO 9001 certification as well, sometime around 94-ish. So it was very organized. You just didn't say, oh, I've I made five cells and I'm going to go into production, which companies still do. So we had, I want to say about a hundred people in uh that included RD, product development, process development, equipment. Um, you know, I mean not from the very beginning, of course, but as we started to see that this was something real, and of course, Sony had just they had just come out of the handicam and the battery, and there was no way Durosell wanted to let, you know, this electronics company, you know, sort of take over the battery world, right? And so so there was, and I'm sure there was a very similar thing happening at Energizer at the time. Yes. Yeah. So yeah, you asked about the scales. We took it to a pilot facility in Waterbury, Connecticut, where we had automated winders. There's a company in Italy called Archotronic. I don't know if anyone's heard of them. Yeah, I know them. They've evolved multiple times since then. Um, so they were, I believe, the suppliers and the manufacturers of the winders for the lithium primary system. Yep. And so they got into uh developing winders and the entire system for roll-to-roll assembly of lithium ion batteries at the time. And so they set up this facility and this line for our lithium ion cylindrical cells in Waterbury, Connecticut. And then there was this panic, of course, at one point that we had no way to scale our electrode processes. Which brings me to a very interesting phase of my own personal career and the development.

SPEAKER_00 24:57

So why couldn't they be scaled? What was the problem?

SPEAKER_04 25:00

Well, we just didn't have the technology and the equipment to do it internally, right? Because remember, all of the lithium primary cells and cathodes were on a grid using PTFE. We don't have slot die coating, we didn't have capability of foil coating, and of course the capital equipment you know is required and the engineering uh capabilities to do that. It's a laborious, time-consuming process.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

Yeah, the electrodes are different enough, it's a slurry process, it's thin, it's on foil, requires a different type of coder. We don't have this internalized. There's gonna be a problem scaling this.

SPEAKER_04 25:34

Exactly. And the tolerances are very tight, have to be very tight for a wound cylindrical cell where the electrodes are much, much longer than the thick uh you know, MNO2 cells, uh, with the MNO2 cathodes. And so all of those reasons uh very nicely put there, Vincent. So for all of those reasons, it was it was gonna be impractical for you know any any US company at that time to be able to internally develop and scale. And so, you know, the company was looking for external partners that had capability to do this. Now, again, other than you know, Sony or you know Panasonic who were doing this internally, there probably was nobody else that a battery company that that could do this.

SPEAKER_03 26:16

I I can't help but I but jump in, you know, because I Vincent and I both worked at 3M and of course 3M was a leader in thin slot die codings for magnetic media, you know, and uh you know, first uh because you know, audio and then videotape and all that sort of thing. Was there a connection ever made there at that time of like, hey, why don't we just use 3M's uh thin slot die coding capability?

SPEAKER_04 26:38

You know, I don't know the answer to that. Um again, I was relatively junior uh in the company.

SPEAKER_03 26:45

Uh and I don't think it happened. That's from my perspective from the inside. I I don't I didn't hear a story like that.

SPEAKER_04 26:51

And actually listening to the to the podcast with with Jeff Don, that question came up in my mind. If did Duracell ever uh approach 3M, and I and I don't believe

Partnering With TDK

SPEAKER_04 27:01

so. And it's interesting you bring up magnetic media because we decided Duracell decided to partner with TDK.

SPEAKER_03 27:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 27:09

For that exact same reason.

unknown 27:11

Right.

SPEAKER_04 27:11

TDK had experience with the magnetic tape manufacturing, which was putting particles on a substrate.

SPEAKER_03 27:19

Yeah, about the same thickness, about the same level of control needed, about the same speed.

SPEAKER_00 27:26

Right slot decoding, calendaring, sledding.

SPEAKER_04 27:30

Absolutely, roll-to-roll, high speed, high quality, right? And all the systems and equipment in place. But there's one problem, right? Uh magnetic media are nothing like electrodes. There is no electrochemistry that has to happen. That's right. And and and believe it or not, that that took us two years of pain to learn and fix. I believe it.

SPEAKER_00 27:54

Uh okay, so so there's a there's some sort of partnership. Is it a joint venture? Is it just a partnership, or like Duracell and TDK say, okay, we want to work together on lithium-ion batteries?

SPEAKER_04 28:04

Yeah, so it was it a joint venture for electrodes, right? So it was a joint venture between the two companies where Duracell would transfer know-how and formulations of the electrodes, and TDK would bring their manufacturing capabilities, capital equipment, and expertise to supply electrodes. So it was really supply agreement for finished electrodes. However, there was a development phase for that, since it was pretty obvious that they hadn't made electrodes before, or at least they were not a battery company.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

Uh and TDK, TDK being Japanese, they're seeing Sony move in this space. Was there already a feel in mid-90s that the clock was ticking for magnetic media?

SPEAKER_04 28:50

I believe it was. Because I think the CDs were right right around the corner, and so the the death knell of the uh magnetic tape was not that far, and it could be heard, and so they were obviously looking for a way out, a a way to capture value from their equipment and capital investments, right? Which was pretty significant. They had this pretty large factory in the area of where Nagano is located. A little town called Chikumagawa in Japan, interesting, where they made these electrodes. And I'll be happy to talk about that if you're uh if you if you're really absolutely go for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is great. So so this is where I don't want to implicate people in decisions, but there was a decision obviously made to partner with TDK, and those of us, you know, relatively junior in the lab were tasked with sort of receiving these electrodes and qualifying them in RD. And so we get this first batch of electrodes from Japan, and they're beautiful, right? So we ship them our LCO material from a company called Saimi. Um, beautiful, you know, lithium cobalt oxide, beautiful physical structure under the SEM. You have you have these smaller particles, I guess, agglomerated into larger, beautiful shapes. And of course, the uh the pitch coke. So we ship them all these materials. We we have our own formulation to use, and we get electrodes back. Well, TDK insisted that they had the capability and they had their own binder to use in this. Uh-huh. And we let them use their binder um with with the rest of the electrode material being ours. So we have these electrodes and we put them into our, you know, into our cylindrical cells. By then, this was like 93-ish. By then, we developed our capabilities a lot more internally. So we'd been doing a lot of safety experiments. And I can't help remembering uh Jeff Dance mentioned about uh don't wait until the end to do your safety testing, right? After the after the MOLLE energy. And of course, we'd all heard about MOLLE energy. We knew what had happened and what could happen if you didn't properly test your battery under use case conditions. And I'd spent, I want to say, close to a year working on cell safety, cell level safety internally in DuraCell. So we knew some of the things that could go wrong. And so we would do a lot of these tests early on. We also did high temperature testing, right? Accelerated high temperature testing. Yeah. Because we we knew that, for example, 60 degrees C storage of a fully charged lithium ion cell, right? At 4.1 those days, 4.1 volts. Yeah. Worst case scenario, you leave it there for a week and then you take it out and you measure how much capacity loss you have, you know, permanent and reversible, right? And that was an indication of all of the parasitic reactions happening at 4.1 volts. You kept them for two weeks and three weeks and four weeks, and before you know it, they were dead. Um so you knew you had a problem. Um, and of course, we were looking at what are some of the things that cause this degradation, right? The effect of electrolyte components, obviously, you know, impurities, moisture in the cathode, right? So, you know, the need to do Carl Fisher analysis, which we knew from MNO2 because MNO2 is so uh prone to moisture absorption uh and reactivity. So certain things we had capabilities within the company. So we did a lot of those things. We did a lot of that

Electrode Failures and Forensics

SPEAKER_04 32:18

diligence. So when you get these electrodes from TDK, the first thing we do is put them into warm cells, do the high temperature testing, do some of the safety testing. And boy, they failed. I mean, they were blowing up left, right, and center. Wow. In in every every safety test, and they were just literally dying after a week at 60C. Holy cow.

SPEAKER_00 32:40

Did the did the electrodes look good?

SPEAKER_03 32:42

They look beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 32:43

They look beautiful.

SPEAKER_03 32:45

And you knew what the binder was? They said we had to set the binder, but they'd tell you what it was.

SPEAKER_04 32:48

They did not tell us what the binder was early on, but we we found out later. But these electrodes were so beautiful, they were so flexible, uh, they were shiny cobalt oxide cathodes. Um, they wouldn't come off the foil, right? And we couldn't make electrodes that looked half as good as those electrodes, right? But you put them side by side, and we're getting 500, 600 cycles without batting an eyelid, and these things were dying in like 50 or 80 cycles at room temperature, right? And so immediately we knew there was a problem. And by the way, we had a deadline of 1995, you know, there was a specific date. I forget if it was, I think July 11th or something like that of 1995. And we all got a watch that had that date on it. The entire team would have been around. It was it was it was beautiful, right? Every day you're looking, you know, 15 times a day, you're reminded of that deadline.

SPEAKER_03 33:42

Wow, that's how you do it.

SPEAKER_04 33:44

Um, and so the clock was ticking, right? And and so we had all these plans, and we were supposed to be getting electrodes from TDK for this pilot cell assembly to start. So there was all this project management going on, right? Everything has to click into place, and that these electrodes were just blowing up and dying. And so it was a, I would say a year and a half at least of an ordeal of trying to figure out what the problem was because they wouldn't tell us their process because that was their know-how. They wouldn't disclose anything there. And of course, they had no testing of the cell, so they were just shipping us the electrodes. Oh boy. So I got the responsibility of essentially trying to figure out what was going on here. You have to basically reverse engineer their electrode. That was the only thing we could do, exactly. And so, you know, going to Japan, going to TDK did not help initially because you know, all it was was like this is what it is, and we can't show you, we can't show you our process, we can't tell you about our equipment, etc. So, long story short, spent a long time on the SCM looking at electrodes, surface cross-sections, anode, cathode, etc. And we discovered some really interesting things. First of all, the particle size of the lithium cobalt oxide was completely different from what we had shipped them. They ground it down. And it's like, huh, I wonder what's going on here. And then you look at them closely, they are completely ground down or ground up. That was one big problem. The second problem we noticed was flocks of carbon. We would see these. This is particular in the cathode, we'd see these elliptical little shapes of just agglomerate of agglomerates of carbon all together. Yeah. Exactly. And so now you know that your electrode has very poor distribution of carbon black. Starting to sound like water to me. Two major areas of a problem with this electrode. One being the destruction of the particle itself, the shape and the structure of it, which means very high surface area, which means very high reactivity, which then explain high temperature performance, which explain the safety.

unknown 35:47

Right.

SPEAKER_04 35:47

And then the poor cycle life at room temperature, lo and behold, yeah, you got this carbon black that's in large agglomerates in the garbage. Got distributed. Yes. And so it was a it was quite an experience to figure this out and then to convince them that there

Fixing Processes and Lessons

SPEAKER_04 36:02

was a problem there. And it turns out that magnetic tape, you guys probably know that from 3M, but there's a media milling process where you take the magnetic particles and you essentially mill the particles into a tiny little particle size distribution. So you get what's called an ink. So the slurry is really called an ink. Uh they don't call it a slurry anymore. And it coats beautifully, right? It's got beautiful rheology, it flows very well, and it coats very well. The third problem we did discover also was that binder, which was contributing to the agglomeration of the carbon black. It was a ter polymer they were using, it wasn't PVDF. And so a lot of these things had to be fixed, and we had lost probably six months. And so we we were shipping, so we decided to accelerate the process because there was no way we had the time for them to develop their process there like we needed it, and ship us back electrodes on time. And so we would make slurries. We had a lab where you know I would oversee this guy making our slurry to our process and shipping 55 gallon drums of slurry to Japan from Connecticut. But just across the ocean.

SPEAKER_03 37:21

Across burns me to hear this because if it had been that you, I mean, this was before I joined 3M, I joined in 99, but if it had been 3M, you know, they were big into floropolymers, right? And they were uh, you know, big into that the coding. The communication would be really clear. Yep. But the big problem would be would they commit to it? Who knows? But in any case, yeah, though you would not have had the same problems, yeah. You'd have a different problem, probably.

SPEAKER_04 37:46

And and I wouldn't have had to fly to Japan.

SPEAKER_00 37:51

Yeah, so it's fascinating. So yeah, so they had all the all the they had all the capital equipment to do it, but their processes had to be adapted. Yeah. And the communication barrier caused you to lose a year.

SPEAKER_04 38:08

Communication barrier was one of it, but I think it's the cultural barrier more than that, right? Yeah. Because and and the belief that they knew electrodes when all they knew was tape. Yeah. And the naivety on our side, let's be honest, of not having to do the due diligence to say exactly, you know, what is your experience with electrodes. So my lesson from that was I never take anybody's word for granted, ever. Right? Yeah, no matter what I'm saying. What I took away for the rest of my life and my rest of my career is show me the money. If you tell me you've got something, show me what you got, right? Right. I don't need

Demanding Process Data

SPEAKER_04 38:45

every little detail, but show me the data.

SPEAKER_01 38:47

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 38:48

Give me samples, show me your process capability, right? And so it's it's it's those things that we did not, we failed at as well, yeah. You know, from Duracell, because we would have saved ourselves a lot, or we would have gone looking for somebody else. Maybe you would have found 3M. What if, right? So this was a huge learning

Rapid Electrode Sampling

SPEAKER_04 39:06

experience. And then we had to create this rapid response team where they would then take these slurries, make the electrodes, and I said, okay, I'm I'm done, I'm in charge of this. You're gonna send me samples of these electrodes from the beginning, middle, and end of this of each roll that you coat after calendaring, right? Anode and cathode. Before you're ready to ship the whole electrode rolls to the US, I'm gonna have to test it, and it's gonna be about 10 days lead time. So we would get electrode samples FedEx. Literally that evening they would be in the oven for drying, the next day they would be wound into cells, and then they'd get through an accelerated formation process and they'd go into the oven at 60 degrees. And we had our baseline requirement of this acceptable 60 degree loss in capacity, right? And only then, and only then do you get the go-ahead to ship the whole role to to our you know, uh pilot plant, right? So we had to do this in order to avoid any further issues. Um, everything was working

Safety Root Cause Analysis

SPEAKER_04 40:10

well, the performance stabilized, and then out of the blue, we started having cells fail on our safety tests. And so that was another huge sort of effort on root cause analysis. And guess what it was?

SPEAKER_03 40:25

I can't guess. Take a guess. Uh maybe uh the iron on the cathode. Well, close.

SPEAKER_04 40:32

It's uh copper uh copper particles in the anode on the anode. I see there you go. I see from the slitting process. Yeah, okay. So once you've made enough electrodes, you and if you haven't done the preventive maintenance on your slitting knives and your slitting blades, you start to generate particles. And you start to generate burrs and yes, you get burrs on the edge of the fur.

SPEAKER_03 40:57

And then the burr breaks off.

SPEAKER_04 40:58

Yes. So so that was another huge setback. And you know, several of us spent, I don't know, two weeks in Japan going through this process trying to find a solution to it. Um, and and so now, and then we had to start you know install the inspection equipment, and the inst was mostly manual inspecting electrodes, which we hadn't been doing.

SPEAKER_03 41:18

It's another one that you wouldn't expect TDK to know because the magnetic media is not on metal foil. So they didn't have experience

Materials And Separator Choices

SPEAKER_03 41:25

with metal foil.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

So the slurs you were sending, were they already NMP solvent PVDF binder? They were PVDF LCO.

SPEAKER_04 41:34

Absolutely, absolutely, yes. And then of course we switched to MCMB 628 or 328. They had those two different grades of the mesocarbon beads. What'd you use for a separator? Separator was Sell Guard. Sellgard was around uh uh by then, right? So we could we were buying a separator from Selguard. They had remember the lithium manganese dioxide cells also used a polypropylene Selguard separator. This was late 80s, early 90s. And so we already had a relationship with the selenese, and so they started coming out with the three-layer separator with the polyethylene in the metal. Yes, with the polypropylene. Yes. We had quite a program evaluating all of these things, all of these different materials, trying to figure out what electrolyte to use as well, right? Uh, you know, there was the DEC, DMC, EMC, EC. Of course, EC was a problem with graphite. Um, the initial cells used PC DME as the solvent. I see. Oh. Uh oh. Well, that was a legacy from lithium manganese dioxide.

SPEAKER_00 42:38

Right.

SPEAKER_04 42:38

Uh so that was the starting point.

SPEAKER_00 42:40

Um so that went uh yeah, exactly. So for the listener, PC doesn't work with graphite, which has become the standard anode material because PC will intercalate into graphite and tear it apart. And so that's a major difference from moving from primary to secondary.

SPEAKER_03 42:58

Or even hard carbon. You can do hard carbon.

SPEAKER_04 43:02

Correct.

SPEAKER_03 43:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 43:03

Because of that co-intercalation of the PC.

High Temp Formations

SPEAKER_00 43:06

So I had looked up your patents from the Duracell era. And as you tell this story, it sort of brings into focus the first one I found, the filing date is in 97, but it's about forming cells at 60 degrees C, you know. And so you just tie that in forming the cells at 60 degrees C, and and then, you know, but actually that providing um benefit later on in life. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 43:33

Yes, it is interesting that you look that up because uh I I mentioned earlier that I spent about a year, a year and a half on internal development of safety and understanding the safety, failure mechanisms of safety of these lithium ion cells. Again, there was not a whole lot of data, not a whole lot of literature. And if Energizer and others were doing it, obviously it was proprietary and confidential, and nobody presented it in these conferences. So um our Cells were blowing up and we had to figure out why. We would have these meetings, and the director of RD or a vice president would stand up there and say, Is that cell safe? Is this cell safe? You should also know that at the time, you know, in Duracell, we were in parallel pursuing nickel metal hydride and lithium ion. So there were two internal organizations that were competing with each other internally. Yes. But anyway, so that safety was a huge thing. And uh what and we were having a lot of failures on the uh hotbox test, the UL 150C oven test.

SPEAKER_03 44:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 44:35

So we spent a lot of time trying to understand what the mechanism was. So literally starting with DSC of the raw of the individual materials, uh, of the electrodes, charged electrodes, discharged electrodes with electrolyte, anode, cathode, etc., to figure out the thermal signatures, the heat generated from each of these reactions. One of the things that we found, um, which is that pattern you just referred to, Vincent, was that if you if you did the initial, the first charge where you stored the cell at higher temperature after partial charge, after partial lithiation, you created a much more tenacious, stronger SCI layer that tremendously helped reduce the heat generation when you when you did the 150-degree test on the graphite on the MCMB, to the point where we would have a hundred percent failure on that test. So we've, you know, one of the things that I remember doing was trying to figure out how I can now do this, take it beyond the DSC to a full electrode. So I started to use this uh two-thirds a can, empty can, uh, where I would take a piece of electrode, uh, a charged electrode, anode and cathode of separately with electrolyte in the right ratio, put it into this can and crimp it shut. Because the DSC uh capsules were blowing up and we were not getting all the data. So we started using this as the as the test vehicle. And that's when we figured out that if we did this high temperatures treatment of the partially charged anode, that heat signature completely disappeared. And in parallel, of course, we were looking at what happens when the whole cell is put in at a high temperature. And the conclusion from all of this was the cathode reacts at about 170 to 180 LCO with electrolyte fully charged. Catha voltage, yep. So there's no way that's going to fail because of the cathode. So the anode takes you, takes a cell up to the 180.

unknown 46:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 46:33

And then that is the cascading reaction. The cathode picks up, and the cat the bang from the cathode is way higher than the anode, right? But the the fundamental sort of root cause is the anode reactivity. The anode's the ignition, yeah. That's the ignition. So if you can if you can snuff that out, you're in good shape, and that's what we did. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 46:52

Right. So you figured out with this high temperature formation in partial lithiated state, the graphite forms a passivation, the SEI, as we call it, the solid electrolyte interphase. And then that was enough of a kinetic barrier to prevent thermal runaway. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_04 47:11

Yeah, that's cool.

Thermal Interrupt Engineering

SPEAKER_04 47:13

We also learned that or realized that temperature was a trigger rather than pressure. So we needed to understand how do we prevent an explosion and a runaway, right? And so the engineering team came up with a thermal interrupt, and we worked with TI, you know, Texas instruments in uh Nattleboro at the time, to come up with a device to uh to cut off the charging once the temperature started going beyond above a certain threshold. That's right. It was a bimetallic strip that was triggered when the temperature reached a certain threshold. Makes sense. But yeah, so we had a lot of uh innovations within the company, engineering solutions to a lot of these problems. Yeah. And we know that.

SPEAKER_00 47:52

I mean, I can just imagine, I can just imagine it must have been pulling your hair out trying to prove this high voltage chemistry with flammable electrolyte as being safe compared to nickel metal hydride, you know, aqueous low voltage, you know, it's so frustrating.

SPEAKER_04 48:09

Exactly. Exactly. And and but you know, you have to, if you want to advance and if you want to go to the best that there is possible, you're gonna encounter challenges that you know we thought about. And and that's what makes it fun, that's what makes it exciting. Yeah, absolutely.

Gillette Ends Program

SPEAKER_00 48:25

So you get a cell that's safe enough. You've got your electrodes that now work from TDK. Does your cell commercialize a lithium ion cell? Or what happens?

SPEAKER_04 48:38

Then Gillette happens. Gillette.

SPEAKER_00 48:43

But how how ready, how, how ready was the cell, would you say?

SPEAKER_04 48:47

I think the cell was pretty ready for commercialization at that time. Um, so this was or late 95, almost 96, give or take. Um the cell met all of the requirements in terms of performance, cycle life, you know, even the safety. Obviously, the pack pack development had to be done. You do have to have some of the features safety features within the pack itself and the system. But again, we were not looking at EVs at the time. These were more for consumer electronics, right? Whether it was mostly for laptops at the time. Um, and so but there was a significant effort on Duracell's side to standardize charging protocol, for example, uh standardize the the chips, right? The the whole BMS, as you would call it now. Um, but also standardized to see if you could standardize this the size of the cells, because there was no 18650 at the time. And Duracell had we had our own size cell, which is called a four-thirds A now, as opposed to a two-thirds A for the lithium primary. We had a four-thirds A. We also had a a flat wound wrap. I think from a technical perspective, the cell was ready to scale, but there was really no customer.

Market Challenges

SPEAKER_00 50:03

Well, I was just thinking, uh, Duracell is used to selling to the end consumer, right? Like that you you you can buy the double A at the store, and that's fine because you can over-discharge a double A and nothing really happens. Or you can completely discharge a lithium manganese oxide cell, and that's fine too. But lithium-ion cells, you can't sell them in the grocery store, right? Like there has to be a BMS managing the cell. And so is that a particular challenge to Duracell? Because this is a completely sort of different market model.

SPEAKER_03 50:37

Yeah, now you're gonna need an electronics maker to partner with.

SPEAKER_04 50:40

You're absolutely you hit the nail on the head, and I think we talked about this once before. That was the killer at the end of the day, right? This business model was completely alien to a Duracell or an Energizer or a Rayovac, for example, right? Any of the US battery companies. So, first of all, if you go one step back or two steps back, a battery company by itself could never have introduced a lithium ion cell into the market by themselves. It's a 3.6 volt, it's a 4 volt charging cell. There was never until that time, the 3 volt lithium primary was the highest voltage system available. Right? Alphan was 1.5 volts, and the lithium MNO2 is like a 3.1, 3.2 volt cell, right? Primary cell. Lithium ion was 4.1 with an average operating voltage of what 3.6 volts. The electronics were not designed to handle a cell, a voltage of that level. And so it had to have been electronics company, the electronics device company or a consumer device company could had the capability to um to develop the electronics and the you know, uh probably even the semiconductors at the time, right? Chargers to handle everything, the entire system, right, and the charging system to be able to handle a 3.6 volt cell, right? And like you said, the DuraCell Energizer, the Alcon battery companies, their business model was to sell it to the consumer directly in every possible outlet in the world. If you go to a tiny little tobacco shop in in Costa Rica and you'll find the guy may have double A cells over there or zinc carbon, but it's still a double A cell. So standardization of size was critically important and necessary, right, for mass production. And then um an outlet where you didn't have the complexities of, like you said, the charging, the the uh the fact that you couldn't sell a lithium ion cell to the consumer directly. You still cannot, right? You you so I think it it was a realization that you couldn't sell this directly to the consumer. I think that was obvious, you know, at least halfway through, maybe not. But then they looked for an electronics company or something. And the and the OEMs were never interested in partnering with you from the beginning. So the Motorellas of this world or the Acer's of this world, they were always developing their devices on their own, and then they would come to you with a cavity and say, Hey, here's what I need to fill this cavity and give me a battery for it, right? Sony didn't do that. They literally, you know, vertically integrated, developed the entire system to match and the electronics, to match the voltage of the lithium-ion cell that they had for their handicap. And so it had to have been a either very closely cooperating, you know, OEM and a battery manufacturer, or completely vertically integrated. That's fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 53:32

And just a sort of side detail question. You only mentioned cylindrical cells, and you're talking about electronic providers wanting to fill this cavity with these cells. We have another interview that we just did with Oliver Gross, and he was talking about the use of the Bellcore technology in valence and the use of pouch cells. Did Duracell ever look at pouch cells, or was it always purely cynical with a wound approach that is currently used in cylindrical cells?

SPEAKER_04 54:04

Uh so yes, we had a cylindrical as well as a wound prismatic design that we were developing in in Waterbury, Connecticut. Um, Duracell also looked at the Belcore technology like uh 20 other companies that licensed that technology for pouch cells. But that was a, let's call it a failed effort uh after about a year of trying to make it work.

SPEAKER_00 54:25

Yeah, oh interesting. So Duracell really leaned into its winding and cylindrical expertise.

SPEAKER_04 54:31

Yes, yes.

unknown 54:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 54:33

Bellcore technology is interesting. Sorry, you did bring that up. I should maybe say because I sp I spent uh probably close to a year on that. It was kind of doomed from the outset. Once you actually dug into it, there was the use of, for example, very high binder contents, right? So the PVDF uh in the anode, in the cathode, and then of course in the separator layer in between that you laminated. There's that whole thing about uh dibutyl phthalate plasticizer that had to be removed after you've uh laminated this system. And so there were a lot of practical scale-up serious issues that sort of killed that, at least for us in Duracell. So we spent a good amount of time and effort and resources on trying to take that to the next step, blocked away from it.

SPEAKER_03 55:17

Right. But it's fascinating to hear you know your connection there with TDK, because then you know what we heard from um Oliver Gross was, you know, how that how from their side from Valence, their their connection with TDK and then to ATL, you know, that's where they where they well, it's very it's quite a modified Bellcore's uh design, but it but it's but there is the rudiment of Bellcore there that they uh but yeah, they didn't have the to deal with dibutyl phthalate at at that point.

SPEAKER_04 55:46

It is it is interesting how you know all of these intersections take place and how certain things have worked in a certain direction and come to fruition where many others have failed or reached some sort of a dead end. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:57

Before we explore you know what happened to DDK, I'm dying to hear what happened to the to the cell that you had at Duris.

SPEAKER_03 56:05

Yeah, right. You said Gillette or something.

SPEAKER_04 56:07

Yeah,

Economics And Shutdown Decision

SPEAKER_04 56:08

I said Gillette because you know it was time for a reckoning, right? Is is this something you could make a business of, like you had alkaline batteries? And and the answer was a clear no for a lot of different reasons, right? There was no standard size, there was no standardization that lasted very long. We actually spun off a company um, you know, focused on the battery management system and the chip design for that. And then, of course, the complexity of a you know, high voltage lithium-ion battery that had to have charge control, that had to have over-discharge control. In other words, it had to be integrated with some electronics. You couldn't sell it to a consumer directly as a cell. And so for all of those reasons, and the fact, I guess, uh, is that we could at the time we could probably buy a Sony battery for less than we could make our own cell. I'm sure that didn't help. Again, economies of scale, and they were probably dumping, they were, you know, they had their own captive market. And so, you know, it's uh they could they couldn't gain market share by literally losing money on it. You know, like somebody likes to say, wrapping a few dollars bills around your cell while you sell it.

SPEAKER_03 57:16

Uh yeah, well, that was that was a a crazy part of the lithium-ion world, which is like the opposite of alkaline, which is that from the beginning, they were like essentially sold under cost, like to enable the sale of a camcorder, right? Exactly. And and then it stayed that way for forever, uh, like extremely razor-thin margins to this day. Yeah, because they were not in nothing.

SPEAKER_04 57:40

You're right, they were not in it to make money on the battery, right? It was the overall device. And so I think for a lot of those reasons, for all of those reasons combined, when Gillette acquired Duracell, it was pretty obvious that this was something that uh could not be sustained. Because there was, like I said, there were a lot of people in in the Duracell, you know, uh lithium ion development organization. And it was a very expensive proposition to take it to the next step. I would guess that it was the same logic that had Energizer walk away from lithium ion as well. And and and Rayovac didn't even get that close, by the way, uh, to lithium ion. Rayoac did not make the sorts of investments that uh Duracell and Energizer had on lithium

Spinoff And Cathode Research

SPEAKER_04 58:21

ion.

SPEAKER_03 58:21

Did the US government help at all with Duracell getting into looking at lithium ion? Or was there was there any government funding?

SPEAKER_04 58:28

Not very significant. So we did get involved with the US ABC project. We did, we were a subcontractor. We had um development effort with Varta batteries in Germany at the time. That's a whole new different uh story in a different angle. Yeah, yeah, and we were actually working on lithium, you know, spinel. So we were developing an a spinel internally. We had folks from uh Jean-Marie Taraskan's lab. Uh, we had folks from Rutgers who were at Duracell.

SPEAKER_03 58:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 58:58

Who had so outside of uh lithium cobalt oxide from Japan, we had our own internal effort on developing a manganese manganese cell. So we we played with a lot of that, we played with the nickel oxide and ran into all the safety issues, the reactivity of nickel oxide. Um, and then we spent a lot of time and effort on uh spinel, manganese, and of course discovered all those problems of manganese dissolution and uh you know interacting with the SCI on the anode. So so yes, that was all part of the internal research that was happening at the time.

SPEAKER_03 59:30

And and the spinel work was that what was the driver? Why so because you you had talked about how earlier it all started with the lithium cold oxide and so on. So why were you using the manganese spinel? Was that for power or what was that about?

SPEAKER_04 59:42

I I think it was all of the above, right? Power was one, cost was the other, but there was also a belief that we could develop our own structure, our own spinel material, uh, and have the IP for uh next generation cathode material for our own cells, which was which is sort of the model where, like I mentioned earlier on the lithium MNO2, we we acquired the license from Sanyo, but then we made significant improvements to the battery, and and it eventually performed better than the that the Sanyo cell. So a lot of that was the improvements that were added on to the base IP and the license from Sanyo at the time. So I believe that was the sort of motivator and driver. So that was the only US government funding for Duracell um through the US.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:33

When uh that decision came of okay, there's not enough business here, we need to dissolve this. What happened? Did the people did the people go find other jobs in other places and start doing lithium-ion elsewhere? Or you know, what's a little bit of that?

SPEAKER_04 1:00:48

Of course, yes, that's an interesting question. Um most of us reinvented ourselves into uh zinc air battery folks or you know, alkaline battery folks, because we still had those businesses, we still had the lithium primary. The point and shoot camera hadn't died yet, uh, digital cameras hadn't come on on board yet. People were still really interested in the primary cell for those applications. To answer your question, most of us sort of disbanded the lithium ion and began to work on supporting the uh other businesses of Duracell. So that brings us to why we are today in this lithium ion world, right? So the three big battery companies, the three only three battery companies successful at the time in the 90s in the US, uh, walked away from lithium ion. Um, and and of course the Japanese took over. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:38

And did they realize that lithium ion was going to be the future of portable energy storage? Like did they just make this the conscious decision, yes, this is the future. There isn't enough margin in it for us, so we're not going for it.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:56

I believe yes. I I think it was pretty obvious that there was a proliferation of electronic gadgets by the time you were in the late 90s, there were enough other things that were using power, needed power, portable power. I mean, portable power was a huge part of Duracell's mission.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:17

There was a vision that was already there of everything will be portable.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:21

Yes, everything was going to be portable. And we were already the

Margins Versus National Security

SPEAKER_04 1:02:24

leaders in that, so it was going to be, it was part of it. But I think the decision was more financial and and near term. Again, publicly traded companies. Um, you got your shareholders to answer for the margins from a a battery like a lithium ion versus margins from you know, let's say an alkaline cell are nowhere, not even close. And so it's it's hard to justify if if you're going to be purely uh looking at uh you know return on investment. Right. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:56

The the complexity of construction for a lithium ion cell is much higher than for an alkaline cell. But you can think of you know very roughly an alkaline cell as just sort of like one outer electrode and one core electrode, very simple construction, but the lithium-ion cell, very thin electrodes wound with very, very tight tolerances. And so was there a sort of a realization that just by nature of the construction, and sort of what Kevin mentioned, lithium ion cells have never had margin in their history. Um, was there a realization that this low margin is inherent to this technology?

SPEAKER_04 1:03:35

I I think that realization definitely came to us, right? To the folks in the business part of the company. But there was not a whole lot you could do about it, right? And so you either stuck with it and you continue to pour money into it with low margins, which your shareholders are not going to like, um, or you cut and cut your losses and move on. Right. And I think the latter is probably what uh is definitely what all the US companies did. But that's that comes that brings us to the whole philosophy of these sorts of developments, right? How important are they for national security? We talk about now when you go to these conferences, you know, right? It's an action security thing, and you everything is powered by batteries or needs to be, will be powered by batteries. Uh and every time there's an oil crisis, people worry about, or people think about, oh, we are the electric vehicles now suddenly going to surge in in popularity again. So it's an on-again, off-again thing until the next crisis comes about, with no long-term vision, no long-term planning, which only really can come, at least has to be led by the government. Uh companies, privately held companies or publicly held companies are not going to make that decision and that investment.

TDK To ATL To CATL

SPEAKER_00 1:04:45

I think this is a perfect segue to explore the alternate reality that happened with TDK. So you guys, you know, uh taught TDK how to make coatings that were for electrochemical systems. Duracell shut the program, but TDK didn't stop, right? So what happened next with TDK?

SPEAKER_04 1:05:07

That's a very interesting question. Um, I don't know what happened between 9096 and maybe the year 2000, but I know to Kevin's point, I think they acquired some additional sort of technology, the Belcore technology. Uh and and they acquired ATL, which was a company that started in Hong Kong, I believe.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:31

I've got ATL is being founded in China in 1999 by Robin Sang.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:35

And and they had they licensed some technology from the US. I don't know how much of what we taught TDK was what they were using or they began to use, or did it all come out of ATL? Uh, because it was there was a three-year gap there. But I can certainly imagine that TDK still had all the equipment and then the capability to make electrodes, uh, and which is ultimately the guts of the cell. Right. So if you could master that piece of it, then the rest of it was say history. They did also focus or decided to stay focused on consumer electronics rather than which is where CATL comes in, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:14

Yeah, so what I read was that the the subsidies, the Chinese subsidies for EVs, were only applicable to domestic companies. And therefore, if ATL wanted to provide batteries for EVs and receive the subsidies, they had to be domestically owned. And therefore they split C ATL out of ATL in order to be able to receive those subsidies.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:38

That makes complete sense.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:39

Yeah, so if we repiece it together, was ATL was founded in in Hong Kong, then acquired by TDK. They grew, became a major supplier of cell for the portable electronics industry. And then when they wanted to get into EVs, they split off CATL. And CATL is now the biggest. The biggest battery maker in the world.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:06

Yep. And became that close to them at one point.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:09

That's yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:12

Exactly. But the circumstances make so much sense. I hadn't really put it together again. I'm just going to hammer it home again. What a big deal that is. That

Vertical Integration Lessons

SPEAKER_03 1:07:22

all those components, like BMS chips, or how you're going to manage uh other safety issues, or how you're going to manage chargers, all that sort of thing. It's all connected to the electronics device that you have. What's your device going to be? Oh, is it a is it a camera or eventually a computer or is it a phone or a power tool? It has to be fully integrated to be able to use a lithium-ion cell. If you don't have that tight relationship, like you're not the same company, how are you going to do it? How are you going to get the kind of um co-development that you need when the power tool company is used to saying, hey, Duracell, here's the shape of a space I have. Can you give me a battery that'll fit in there?

SPEAKER_04 1:08:02

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I think that's the difference between the successful companies and the not so successful companies, right? If you look at EVs, for example, I mean, they are ultimately mostly vertically integrated or trying to become vertically integrated because the battery ultimately is just a means to the end, right? It's the vehicle that's your product. And so I think that is one takeaway from what we are observing looking back at the electronics industry as well as consumer electronics as well as power tools and uh EVs. Interestingly, the medical device industry has been quite different. There's only a few big players on implantable devices, but if you look at Medtronic, they have been vertically integrated from the beginning in your backyard, right? Um, Boston Scientific uh Guident originally, right? They were not vertically integrated, but back in 2001, they made a very conscious effort and they hired a bunch of my colleagues from Duracel when they decided to become vertically integrated to do to bring in the battery development into guidance, even though that's not within their core competency and you know unlikely to be for most companies, but it's a conscious effort that I think ultimately pays big dividends. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:25

Yeah.

Medical Battery Market Reality

SPEAKER_00 1:09:26

So that's sort of interesting because after leaving Juracell, you went to Rayovac, and you also ended up at Eagle Pitcher and also at Integer, which is like the descendant of Great Batch, and I'm skipping a few steps here. Um but integer and and Eagle Pitcher, at least in the departments you were in, are directed at the medical devices and yet they're not vertically integrated. They're purely cell manufacturers that sell into medical devices. So there was a success in that ecosystem, it seems like a decoupled approach could be viable.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:07

I I would say a limited success. It was always a struggle. So for example, if you were to look at uh medical batteries for Eagle Picture, it was always a struggle to get into Boston or Medtronic, particularly for one of their major devices. It was almost always a peripheral thing that they didn't have the bandwidth to focus on. It was a little different with startups. Startups desperately needed a battery source or they would go defunct. And so the startups were always looking for a battery supplier, which is where there was that niche.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:50

So you ended up starting in lithium-ion at Duracell, and then you ended up working on zinc air, lithium CFX, lithium MNO2, all kinds of primary chemistries that are established and have large markets and manufacture in the United States. Do you think there's anything that the lithium-ion world needs to learn from the primary world?

SPEAKER_04 1:11:17

It's a tough comparison. That's a great question. The challenge again, the uniquely close connection between a lithium ion cell and the device that doesn't necessarily exist for all these other applications, certainly not for the primary systems. Even if you look at a medical device, an implantable medical device, where every device has a different cavity shape for the battery. Because every device is for a different application. The only difference is that you have a unique shape that affects the cost of the cell. It's not as closely integrated into the electronics and to the functioning and to the safety and to the handling of that cell for the entire duration of the life of that device like it is in an EV.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:13

Well, you know, one thing we did we have seen recently that came from capacitor over to lithium ion is the tablets uh cell design where you just take the edge of the current collector and bend it over for cathode on one side and anode on the other. But was that kind of approach tablets used at all for primaries? Uh yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:33

A version of that, yes, for the lithium MNO2 cell. In fact, DuraCell cell design did include something at the very top of the cell where you brought all the current collector together for a much higher power uh lithium primary cell. It used to be called the crown of thorns. There you go. Um there was an internal name for it. It was very painful in you know, literally and figuratively, uh, because you had all these strands of stainless steel current collector that you you could it can poke you and hurt you. Um but it was called the crown of thorns. So, yeah, there's a lot of interesting things you can take away. I mean, the dry electrode process is you know, we like like we started this discussion. Yeah, there's a lot of similarity to that whole shearing that has to happen to give you a dry electrode with PTFE as the binder.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:21

Right. We

Rebuilding North America Supply

SPEAKER_03 1:13:22

kind of made sense of how the big battery companies in the US didn't become lithium-ion for the reasons we discussed and it made sense. But now things are kind of standardized and you sort of you know who you can sell to. And so the playing field is a lot different. What do you think should happen, what's reasonable, whatever approach you want to take there on bringing uh battery production into North America.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:45

If you look back over the last 20 years, 30 years, let's say, right, since the early 90s, a lot of the technology was developed in the West. The conversation with Jeff Don talked about how important and significant Canada was, right? In the early development of the lithium biotechnology. And you look at the history with John Goodinough and Stan Wittingham and all those pioneers. Um, a lot of that technology came out of the US. That's not to say that the future is going to be the same. You know, I think we have to first recognize that Asian countries that initially they would reproduce Western technology, manufacture it cheaply, those days are gone. I mean, today there's tremendous amount of research and development happening in countries overseas that is vast, outpacing what is coming out of the US. And so I think the one thing that we've always missed is a consistent policy and a vision at a national level in the US or in any Western country to recognize a long-term need and then setting itself to achieve that, right? To accomplish that, whether it takes 10 years or 15 years or 20 years. I think Michel Gauthier was talking about it's not a four-year cycle where you can develop something and make a business out of it, right? It's the same thing. So if you put all of this together, one of the fundamental requirements is gonna have is is to have a unified mission and a and a vision for the country and for society nationally, which is then supported by some taxpayer dollars and obviously some cost share by the individual companies. But that is, I think, a fundamental flaw or a reason why a lot of these technologies develop here, uh, but they never come to fruition and are never manufactured here in mass scales.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:41

And it's happening everywhere. Yeah, we can't get that consistent vision.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:44

It's a complete comeback to the beginning of the interview where you were looking at the the funding in Japan and the funding in the United States, and you could see the 15 years of runway that your Japanese colleagues had. Uh, but that was in fuel cells. But we're sort of covering the same topic here, but in batteries.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:02

So that theme just keeps coming back, right? Long-term vision and the commitment to stay the course. Now, the course may change, you may come to different forks, you gotta be able to take the right fork or figure out how to, you know, make those decisions and choices. But that long-term vision has been lacking. Uh, and I think that is probably the single most important reason why you know we are we are falling behind in a lot of different areas.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:30

Yes, indeed. And then the other piece that we had talked about separately, but I'll just bring it back in here is the building of the human capital, uh training enough people. And what in that area, I think about you know what you know, what Tesla did uh is to have Panasonic come over, set up their own shop inside of a building owned by Tesla, and then after years of doing that, to take over and make cells themselves. That seems like a good, a good strategy, you know. You're right.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:58

And I think it is being done. I read about and hear about GM collaborating with the LG Energy Solutions, for example, or is it Samsung? You know, and they have some joint projects and plants that are being built, either for the material itself or also for cell manufacture. But that has to go on fast drive or in a high gear compared to where we are today. It's sporadic. It seems to be sort of an afterthought, you know. Whereas in Asia, you look at China, for example. I mean, they literally build cities, they build an entire ecosystem, right? You need the rest of the supply chain nearby. It's consensus, it's a long-term vision, and then just going out and getting it done. You'll have a few stumbles along the way, but you will still ultimately be

Data Centers

SPEAKER_04 1:17:48

successful.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:48

Another thing I think about it's like it's not too late because a lot of people are thinking of, oh, what is too late now that AI is arriving and so on? But you're gonna need power, okay? You're gonna need to store energy and more and more.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:00

You're absolutely right. And actually, you made a good point because at the battery conference last week there was a talk, right, about the growth of these different uh applications, mostly driven by AI and the data centers, is going to literally dwarf all the other applications. Hopefully, it's not a bubble. Um, or if it's a bubble, it's a small bubble. Um, but the need for stationary power and energy storage is there. So maybe there is still an opportunity for us to get our act together.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:30

What stage are we in for the expansion of data centers? Okay, so we're only at the beginning of it, I think. And and if I put myself back when we were really expanding on EVs, the confidence was really low for EVs at that early stage. The confidence that the data centers are going to demand a lot and that uh energy storage for other reasons as well is gonna become super important. It's universal. Everyone, everyone seems to agree, like it's a foregone conclusion. So it's totally different. So maybe this is a great time to invest.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:59

That's that's a very good point. I mean, it needs somebody to take charge, whether it's the government or a company, uh, to lead the way and make it successful so that others feel it's a worthwhile investment and effort.

Closing

SPEAKER_03 1:19:13

Thanks a lot, Kartak. It was a great dive into the practical realities of those early days, and especially interesting to hear the story of what we all think of when we what was synonymous with batteries when I was a kid, it was Duracell and like what happened? Why didn't they get into lithium ion? And we we've got that uh really clear now, and and from it we can sort of see where we got to go next. So great job of explaining that.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:39

Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity. It was fun. Frankly, like I said earlier, I am starting to look back, and you know, I'm sure you guys have a much better vantage point here. When you listen to all these and put all these together, very soon you'll have a much better picture of what worked, what didn't work, and what we can do. So um I can't wait to hear that.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:58

Yeah, this was great. I mean, it was great to see that that they actually, you know, they tried. It wasn't that they didn't try, they actually went for it, you know, in a significant way.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:07

And uh rationally decided the business doesn't fit.

unknown 1:20:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:12

Well, that's right. Thank you so much, Karthik. It was an absolute pleasure.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:16

Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Good luck. Look forward to the next ones.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:22

Battery potential is produced by Cyclical, a battery consulting and services company headed by Vincent Chevry and Mari Krauss. Music by big players.