Bill Howard - Medtronic

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So we made the lithium MNO2 cells. Some surprising things happened. Those patients were living years later. We only planned on making this initial production run, but we had to get all those materials, the same materials again, to make them several years later, and then a second time several years later again, because the patients kept living. They not only improved their quality of life, but it also improved their longevity.

SPEAKER_05 0:52

And I'm Kevin Eberman. Welcome to Battery Potential. Kevin. Vincent.

Bill Howard

SPEAKER_05 1:01

Today it's a pleasure to have Bill Howard join us. I know him from the Twin Cities section of the Electrochemical Society. But Kevin, you've known him for even longer.

SPEAKER_02 1:13

Yeah, that's right. And uh it's my pleasure to be able to introduce him here. Uh, you know, Bill Howard brings more than five decades of hands-on experience to the history of battery development, starting at Gould National Batteries in the 1960s with fuel cells, metal air systems, and early carbon fluorination work. Through the early 1970s, he was evaluating LeClanche cells from around the world and getting his first exposure to lithium technology, followed by lithium sulfur work tied to Argonne National Laboratory research whose discontinuation he can speak to firsthand. He then moved to Medtronic, where he spent the heart of his career developing batteries for implantable medical devices, touching nearly every major primary lithium chemistry of the era, from lithium iodine to lithium silver vanadium dioxide, before transitioning in the nineties to rechargeable lithium-ion systems with the unique performance constraints and safety constraints that you have for implantable medical devices. I had the pleasure of working with Bill from 2006 to 2010, and now I'm having the pleasure again of be able to talk to him here on this podcast. Welcome, Bill. Thank

Early Chemistry Spark

SPEAKER_02 2:25

you. So how did you at the very beginning, how did you fall into this battery science? You like if you think of your university days, were you always interested in science?

SPEAKER_00 2:36

Well, I was interested in chemistry since I was uh four or five years old. Burn a lot of sulfur and make a lot of gunpowder and things like that.

SPEAKER_05 2:46

Did you ever get into trouble?

SPEAKER_00 2:49

Didn't like some of the things that happened on the stove, but other than that, things went fairly good. That's great. So then you went and studied chemistry in university? At uh Hamlin University. While I was at Hamlin, I started working for Gould in the 1960s. And I spent my early years uh developing air cathodes for fuel cells and later uh metal air cells such as zinc, air, and aluminum air.

SPEAKER_05 3:19

So, you know, I'm pretty connected to the battery world. I had never heard this name before. Could you give us a little bit of a primer on what Gould was and what it became, just a little overview?

Gould Battery Legacy

SPEAKER_00 3:31

When I started, Gould was primarily a lead acid battery company. They also made uh Nickel Academy batteries. But over a period of time there were a lot of acquisitions and they became a conglomerate. They bought a company called Burgess Battery. They bought a lot of other companies and merged them in and uh made seawater batteries and for torpedoes and all that type of thing. So they were turned into a very large corporation. When I first joined, they were like a hundred million dollar company. When I left, they were a several billion dollar company. Wow. But they don't exist anymore. Right. They broke up in the uh 1970s and 80s uh with the high interest rates and being highly leveraged. The company had to break up. The zinc air batteries went to a Duracell, the lead acid batteries went to a uh Australian company, and the uh nickel academy batteries went to a company called SAFT, and they eventually moved the operations down to Mexico.

SPEAKER_05 4:42

Okay, so it ended up having a legacy in energy storage across many companies.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

So, what was your first project at Gould? I was developing air cathodes and uh spent lots and lots of hours uh looking at different types of catalysts and different hyperstructures, and we were interested in low-cost catalysts. Um my heroes back then were Karl Kordesh of Union Carbide, which is now uh energizer, and uh guy by the name of Professor Ernest Heiger, who was at Case Western University. Kordash could make really good batteries, but Professor Jaeger could explain what I was seeing.

Battery Labs Before Computers

SPEAKER_05 5:24

So, you know, sixties, seventies, totally different world. What does a battery lab look like in the sixties and seventies? How do you collect data? How do you plot data?

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Yeah. Well back then at first we were doing everything uh manually, just readings on cells and electrodes, we have reference electrodes and that type of thing to and recording on a piece of paper and uh lots and lots of paper. Um later on there were uh you know ran things with recorders, and there you have lots and lots of paper, and I'm not sure it's any better than uh just writing down periodic values. Strip chart recorder, you mean? Yes. And then uh when I started getting into the dry cells, I set up a data acquisition system where I could automatically record values at intervals that I wanted to and endpoints that I wanted, and cycle the batteries the way that I or test the batteries the way that I wanted to, American national standards uh methods.

SPEAKER_05 6:32

Manually recording current voltage time, and then maybe after that with strip charts. And then are you manually integrating to get capacity?

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Yeah, we had to do everything by hand um and and calculations, sure.

SPEAKER_02 6:48

And then for the data acquisition system, you know, today people don't know, right? They just think, oh yeah, I buy a data acquisition system. I'm guessing that you kind of had to build it.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Right. It was sort of a uh custom uh custom system where I had to put in various components to make it do what I wanted it to do.

SPEAKER_02 7:06

So you had to be not just a chemist, but also uh electrical engineer.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

Fortunately, I had some uh good uh electrical engineers in the next uh lab, so I had good people to ask questions from. And how big was the group at Gould working on batteries? Oh, let's see. It started maybe at uh 20 and then went up to maybe 75 or something towards the uh end. Yeah, it's a pretty big group. All sorts of different batteries, so it was uh I was working it with uh one other person on LeClanche type or carbon zinc batteries. Uh on the fuel cell project, we just had a you know like a half a dozen people or so. On lead acid, they just had a huge number of people. Right.

SPEAKER_05 7:54

That was their original chemistry. Right.

Leclanche Cell Basics

SPEAKER_05 7:57

So can you tell us a little bit, just a brief overview of what a LeClanche cell is?

SPEAKER_00 8:02

It's uh essentially a carbon zinc battery, and then it has an electrolyte, uh, which is aquaspaced with ammonium chloride and zinc chloride. That's a usual combination.

SPEAKER_02 8:14

Now how would you make one? You wanted to make one to test it in the lab? How did you do that?

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Uh I was making uh cells with paper lined cases or separators. So I would take a zinc can, I lined it with a paper separator and a wad of essentially real thin cardboard down at the bottom, and then I extruded a mix, cathode mix, into the can, and then I inserted a carbon rod into the middle of the mix and a cap that went on the top of the cell, and it had a polymer seal around it, and I used a ring enclosure which made a real tight hermetic seal on the cell. When I tested some cells with metallic contamination, they essentially s swelled up like balloons. So the seal was really, really good.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

Yeah, I see. I mean, just imagining the perspective you have having seen so many different chemistries.

SPEAKER_05 9:14

If we use sort of lithium ion as a reference point, how would the energy density of a system like that compare to lithium ion?

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Oh, just ten or twenty percent would be my guess. I'm just guessing, but uh, so there'd be a factor of m more than a factor of five.

SPEAKER_05 9:35

Essentially a order of magnitude less. Yeah, it's it's interesting to keep in perspective in the end how much lithium ion ends up changing the field. And at this point, these cells, what are their purpose?

SPEAKER_00 9:46

What are they for? Oh the uh back in the 70s, uh dry cells were used for just powering everything. Not just flashlights, but uh people started to get portable radios, essentially anything you wanted portable.

SPEAKER_05 10:00

And so all these cells are for consumer applications. Consumer electronics, right.

Defense Batteries

SPEAKER_05 10:05

Now Gould also made cells for defense applications.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

Right. One of the their big contracts was for submarine batteries, uh, where they made big lead acid batteries, which are just huge things, take up a good pair of the volume of a room, and you could imagine putting a bunch of those in a submarine to uh power everything in the submarine. Uh later on they made silver zinc batteries for the submarines, and they were about a uh less than a third of the size of the light acid cell. And they also made batteries for torpedoes, and there they used a system called mag magnesium silver chloride, and it got activated when it got thrown into the ocean, and the salt water was the electrolyte. And they were they were uh definitely a one-time uh battery.

SPEAKER_05 10:56

That's wild. You know, I mean it's really interesting to a certain extent now with lithium-ion, there's a few cathode materials and a couple of anode materials, but there's not that much variety. Here it feels like with these aqueous systems there was a lot of variety, a lot of electrochemical couples being looked at and tried out for different applications.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

Right. Well, even with the uh Laclanch or zinc chloride uh batteries, uh there was big differences in the active materials. Uh you had electrodeposited and all sorts of synthetic MNO2s, and then you had natural ores where they just sort of scooped it out of the ground and put it in a battery. So there was big differences in the uh capacity and performance of the uh of the batteries. In fact, some of the uh batteries that I've seen actually had big pieces of quartz in the mix. Wow. That's wild.

SPEAKER_05 11:54

I mean, if you think now about the level of PPM specs on battery materials and tight particle size distributions, the idea that you could pick something out of the ground is just wild.

SPEAKER_02 12:06

Yeah, it's like, oh it starts to make the old uh classroom lemon battery not look that stupid.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

Um along that same line, I'm getting a little ahead of time, but back when I was doing the lithium iron metal sulfide work for Argonne, uh developing the techniques for manufacturing, what we started with was fool's gold mined out of the ground, which had all sorts of quartz and everything else in it, and that went through a flotation process to purify the material and end up with pure fool's gold, which just looked like gold, and that was the uh positive material for the early lithium sulfur cells, lithium molten salt, sulfur cells.

Molten Salt Lithium Era

SPEAKER_05 12:49

Yeah, so maybe tell us a little bit more about you know the fact that these cells contained lithium. Was that sort of a categorical change? In what sense did it change things?

SPEAKER_00 12:59

Well, when Argon first started, they were using uh just pure lithium, melted in a pool, which was pretty hard to make a any type of practical cell from. Then they went to a lithium-aluminum alloy, allowed them to make a more practical molten salts battery if there is such a thing. And uh, you know, it had a lot of dimensional changes when you charge and discharge a cell, but it functioned quite well. It was a molten salt battery up at around 350 degrees centigrade. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 13:33

Wow, is it how is that sealed?

SPEAKER_00 13:36

Um the batteries that I made for argon were made in a stainless or in a steel steel can which was laser welded, and then it had a compression seal that the feed-through went through. You essentially had some uh boron nitride parts which were relatively stable at lithium potential, and you take a boron nitride powder, compress that down very carefully so you didn't uh d damage anything to make a relatively hermetic seal. It wasn't uh hermetic, but it was pretty close to it.

SPEAKER_05 14:17

Wow. Why? Why make a battery that's running at 350 degrees Celsius and has molten salts?

SPEAKER_00 14:23

Uh back at that time uh the things like lithium-ion cells and that type of thing really didn't exist. The early tries at making uh batteries at lower temperature with lithium in organic electrolytes had all sorts of dendite problems and uh it was just really didn't make an awful lot of progress on uh rechargeable lithium batteries back in the 70s. But even back in the 70s, we could tell that the future was with lithium batteries and maybe even uh lithium-rechargeable batteries. My research director, uh Dr. Dave Douglas, went and visited uh Whittingham in his laboratory at Esso or Exxon, and uh he came back really impressed, and he usually took quite a bit to impress him, and he was impressed with the work that Whittingham was done and uh saw that as you know possibly the future. He was in and with a confidentiality agreement, so he uh really we really couldn't do anything, but we could uh at least be aware of what uh direction of the technology was going.

SPEAKER_05 15:37

Right, so there was this recognition of the lithium being a small atom, very electropositive, I'm gonna get a high energy density. The room temperature systems don't work. Maybe these high temperature systems where things are molten will work. And in these systems, what you know, your guess, how does the energy density of those systems compare to what we have now?

SPEAKER_00 16:04

Oh, they are uh order of well not an order of magnitude, they're m much less than the lithium ion cells that we are right now. We had a lot of a fairly heavy molten salt in the in the battery. Um the really heavy components, the lithium aluminum alloy was retained in a steel case or uh you know expanded metal case, and the uh positive electrodes were were essentially had the FES2 in a carbon foam matrix and result in a very poor energy density. It was a heavy c and uh but it sort of proved the technology that it you know things could happen. Right.

Global Battery Benchmarking

SPEAKER_05 16:56

Now you had mentioned that when you were at Gould part of your work was also testing batteries from around the world.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

Yeah, when I was doing the uh uh LeClanche Say cells, I was also able to get cells from around the world. I tested a lot of the um almost all of the Japanese manufacturers, and they just produce terrific batteries, much better than anything that we could produce in this country, and they had them custom for the the type of applications for you know very long life for higher power. They really had well-designed cells that performed well and didn't didn't leak, where the US manufacturers, uh, which at that time was uh ever ready, um, PR Mallory, uh Rayovac, and Virgis, had much lower energy density and performance on standard tests compared to the Japanese cells. We just weren't in the same ballpark as theirs. They had a uh domestic market that required that quality and they delivered it. And the US we didn't uh weren't used to uh such high quality products.

SPEAKER_02 18:19

So you think it was driven by the demand in Japan, that there was a different kind of demand. Right.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

I also back in 1972, China got opened up. Uh people went over to China, and some of those people that went over there um put flashlight or put batteries in their flashlights and brought them back. And I was fortunate enough to get a lot of those batteries and test them. And it was enlightening. At that time, the technology of the of China, their batteries were about like what we made in the 1930s, and this was in the 1970s. But uh they had an awful lot of hand work. Their cathode bobbin, which I talked about, was uh sort of hand wrapped with uh paper and uh threads to uh hold it together, and they quite often used a very heavy starch paste, which was also used in cells in the U.S. uh years ago. Um even some of the cases were hand soldered. Uh-huh. Zinc, zinc, you know, like a D cell with a soldered case, and uh a lot different than what we were used to in the U.S. didn't have performance that was anywhere near what uh U.S. customer would expect. But they compensated for it by putting more water in the mix so that so they would uh still last for a while. Uh I see. Okay.

SPEAKER_05 19:59

You mentioned putting them in their flashlights. Now, was that because they were not supposed to be taken out of China?

SPEAKER_00 20:07

I I I don't uh know for sure the answer to that, but I would wouldn't be surprised if that was the uh what was going on. And um and what about Europe?

SPEAKER_05 20:21

How was Europe positioned?

SPEAKER_00 20:22

I I I only tested one Russian or a couple Russian batteries, and at that time they had some of the best electrochemists in the world. So I was expecting a lot from those. They looked really beautiful. They chrome plated on the outside uh really looked like the best you could possibly get, but inside the their engineers left a lot to be desired. I thought they had my personal opinion was that at that time they had lousy battery engineers. Uh the performance wasn't any better than a Le Clanche cell, and they were preparing uh alkaline cells. Um and uh I only tested a few cells from Germany made by Varda, and they were excellent. Uh they they were zinc chloride cells, and they didn't leak, they had good uh rate performance, they did everything that uh Varda claimed they would do.

SPEAKER_02 21:27

Now the Japanese ones you met you had, w w would you remember the the companies that were behind the Japanese ones?

SPEAKER_00 21:33

Oh, there were a half a dozen different companies. Uh Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Fuji, um Sanyo, yeah, well Panasonic is Mits Matsushita, and they were and there were a couple others, and they were all much better than what we'd they tried to be competitive with each other, and they were they were.

SPEAKER_02 21:54

So did you see the the US then trying to catch up to this uh you know Japanese advantage? in the right.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

No, I didn't. I I saw them s saying that they uh they don't ha didn't have to make it as expensive a battery in the US. Customers didn't expect it and uh they if they had a high price battery out there they felt they couldn't sell it. So they were more concentrated on cost and volume.

SPEAKER_05 22:21

Yeah, because that's kind of an interesting competitive advantage because the cells that you describe have very maybe rough construction, you know, accuracies on the orders of millimeters. And then when you go to lithium ion you need accuracies on the almost on the micron level. I wonder if the fact that they were that much more precise had higher quality control allowed an easier transition in the future to lithium ion.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

I I think it was their that plus their research culture where they had really good academic research that was that interfaced well with their industries and they they were able to pull it all together. They were very quality and conscious and research oriented. You know I talked about uh Gould when they disassembled the the company there's some

Policy Shifts And Lost Decades

SPEAKER_00 23:18

similar thing happened in the 1980s where the energy conservation projects of the government got terminated. At the Department of Energy they just had huge layoffs battery work went down to just a fraction of what it was.

SPEAKER_02 23:37

Was that a political shift in the country at the time?

SPEAKER_00 23:40

Which president came in? Uh that was Reagan who many people think did everything great but that was to me that was one thing that he did that was bad. In my personal opinion you know you can't take research and turn it on and off and this turning it off in my opinion set us back decades where the US could have been a leader in both electric in electric vehicles and batteries. In the lab right next to me there were electrical engineers that were working on uh control systems for uh postal vehicles and uh in delivery vehicles which uh you know would have been lead acid but they would have worked great for the application but the all that activity just stopped abruptly and uh the layoffs in Department of Energy you know the research activities in industrial companies followed suit and uh we had some lost decades.

SPEAKER_02 24:46

Lost decades I mean that that's that's just my opinion that's not uh what anybody else would say well well I mean that that it does I mean we we we've all in the battery world we've all seen how in the past two decades you know China's just taken off in the battery world and and one thing they've had is you know consistent government leadership uh investing in it and um yeah in the US we've come and gone in in investment and currently we are pulled away from battery investment again.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

Along that same line that zinc chloride cell that I did I uh did a couple of production runs in the factory and the cell that we made performed very well you know better than other commercial batteries at that time but we were in a transition to alkaline cells or the industry was and so the work was stopped abruptly and that production line that my zinc chloride cells were made on was eventually shipped over to China for them to manufacture batteries. Wow what year would that have been that happened after I left Gould but that would have been in the uh in the late 70s.

Move To Medtronic

SPEAKER_02 26:05

Interesting okay so you left Gould and you went to Medtronic uh yeah how did that transition happen?

SPEAKER_00 26:12

Well what happened was that I was working for Gould and I was down at Argonne for a year and then when I came back I was setting up a laboratory to do the lithium sulfur work in uh in glove boxes in Minnesota. At a time Gould decided to move everything to Illinois and I personally didn't want my kids raised in Illinois I like Minnesota so I uh left Gould and uh went to uh Medtronic.

SPEAKER_02 26:48

I see and did they have uh a battery team at that time or were you the how many battery people were there or what was the mission?

SPEAKER_00 26:55

Well the time that I joined they were in the process of forming a battery uh research and development group they had a really top-notch evaluation battery evaluation group and that's where I first joined Medtronic as part of their evaluation group I was uh given to uh responsibility for the Mercury zinc cell and the Mercury zinc cell um at that time had all sorts of it uh would get mercury shorts and some uh pacemakers would only last six months. Wow and the batteries were large they also evolved hydrogen which meant meant you couldn't make a hermetic device that they were essentially potted in a uh in epoxy and were more like a hockey puck than uh what we now consider a uh a pacemaker and were they worn if they were the size of a hockey puck were they worn outside the body? No they were implanted in the battery but they were very large the body doesn't like large things so uh making them smaller was a big incentive

Pacemakers with Lithium Iodine

SPEAKER_00 28:15

and at the this was in 1976 when I joined Medtronic and later that that same year uh Medtronic licensed the technology from Wilson Great Batch for lithium iodine cells and that's the way that the industry went it allowed for the improvements in pacemakers that have happened over the past decades and is still one of the primary excuse batteries used for uh implantable pacemakers it has a very low rate capability but for uh pacing you're talking about m microamps rather than milliamps and and was what was its advantage over the zinc mercury? Um it lasted for decades. Right and and no no dendrites and no dendrites it uh a elect was formed in situ where the iodine reacted with the lithium and formed a lithium iodide layer on the on the lithium also had a PVP polymer iodine complex on the on there which was fairly a little more conductive you had a cell that would last for decades and was extremely reliable it wouldn't short it uh uh a lot of things that you could do and do right with that cell and those were made uh manufactured internally at Medtronic for use by Medtronic or yes Medtronic made most of its batteries itself but it did did sometimes buy uh batteries from other suppliers why was that why did they why did they make them for instance they wanted to be completely vertical integrated so that they had control of the design and all the processes so they could ensure that they had the reliability and performance that they wanted from the product and depending on a battery from some other company to make meet all the needs of the device didn't necessarily give the best opportunity for the company or the patient. Yeah I see so it's kind of a a quality and safety control?

SPEAKER_02 30:38

Correct.

SPEAKER_05 30:39

Mm-hmm you sort of pointed out that for the lithium iodide system it was a primary system. Up to now in everything that you've talked about all the cells were primary cells they were single discharge cells.

SPEAKER_00 30:54

Right uh that's true other than uh in 1970s it was actually the first pacemaker um it was with a nickel cadmium battery it was made by GE it was a fairly large battery but it had very poor patient's uh compliance because uh it required such frequent charging that uh and when you have a life sustaining device you can't have a patient that forgets to recharge his battery and it's uh uh some patients are totally dependent on the on the pacemaker to survive and uh it you've got to have a hundred percent compliance and that device didn't have a hundred percent compliance it was also very large and uh patients really didn't like that either it was sort of like the hockey puck this this has nothing to do with uh battery chemistry but I I thought that uh there was an early uh pacemaker that was sort of nuclear powered or something like that is that right oh there were uh several of those I've known people that have had them and they you put out a very low power for a long time they were very very they were they made the hockey pucks look small okay they had because they you know tried to shield from the uh poloni and uh they lasted I one fellow that I know that had one who was also an engineer at Medronic uh he decided to get a new pacemaker after 25 years not because it wasn't working but because he just wanted to have the modern technology and features that the uh new pacemakers had yeah yeah so it was lasting 25 years no problem interesting okay yeah and um you know you were in the in the industry for so long from 1976 until when did you retire from Medtronic? Uh about uh 2007 but then I sort of continued on and off doing things uh through uh oh about 2016 or so just periodic consulting okay sure so you you saw um you know basically 40 years of of uh medical battery use

Regulation And Liability

SPEAKER_00 33:24

was there an evolution on the regulatory side in terms of what was allowed I think there was uh a lot of the uh things uh the company sort of taught the FDA w what to uh what to look for and that type of thing uh right uh sort of uh educated the uh uh FDA uh inspectors because they they were a primarily a inspected drugs and that type of thing and they weren't uh when they started devices they needed a education so the uh companies sort of taught them the what's an important issues for poor batteries so that they could do a decent job of uh both monitoring the industry and uh knowing what to look for for you know as far as reliability and that type of thing.

SPEAKER_02 34:21

Was there also a change in sort of this I guess I think of the US today as being what I would call very litigious you know that uh everybody's considering you know uh lawsuits all the time both in you know who could who could file one and and how do I gotta protect my risk from them. Did that change as well in the in the calculus at Medtronic on risk uh around batteries?

SPEAKER_00 34:45

Um Medtronic uh always had to uh you know be concerned about the problem of having a defective project product out in the field even before the FDA was involved but uh it became more of a problem uh later there was an incident back in uh the 80s where there was a medical device company that was using Teflon for uh in their device and they weren't using it properly and uh run into all sorts of problems with the device and DuPont ends up getting sued because they had deep pockets and the small company didn't and so uh it made suppliers of materials reluctant to deal with medical device companies. Medtronic has always identified their uh suppliers so that and none of them have ever been had to pay a penny for lawsuits. Medtronic has always protected their suppliers but that's a that is a record real problem. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 36:00

Yeah um in the lithium world you know there's a few incidents that are sort of famous you know like the the galaxy note blowing up um were there sort of like landmark incidents in the medical world that sort of set the course for batteries no I can't recall of any uh devices where there were any explosions or that type of thing.

SPEAKER_00 36:24

Yeah I'm I'm not aware of any um I was at a uh battery meeting in Florida which is on on rechargeable batteries and I one of the people that was speaking was a shipping company that uh takes batteries and ships them around the uh world and they picked up some batteries from our competitors which were a high rate battery and they just threw their batteries in without proper packing and they short it out and caused a fire at their uh shipping facility and so uh he showed the pictures of it at the at the meeting and I said they're not ours I knew who they were what came after those those were lithium uh MO2 uh high rate batteries

Beyond Iodine New Chemistries

SPEAKER_00 37:16

what came after uh lithium iodide it was the next step in improving well in the uh 1970s also I was worked on lithium bromine it theoretically it should have a higher capacity but uh I've essentially killed it as a future battery it uh the lithium bromide results in a more resistive layer on the negative electrode and you get relatively poor performance from it and the bromine is just a nasty chemical it uh any moisture it's hard to remove moisture and that type of thing if there's any moisture at all you get uh HBR to lead to corrosion of uh cases and uh it was it was bad news I came up with a lot of different reasons why you wouldn't want to use uh lithium bromine I got it so that I'll think so you were responsible for uh not not doing that stopping that direction yeah good good reason because uh one of our competitors was thinking of uh coming out with those and he thought that I did a uh he he referred to as a hatchy job on the battery but uh it was actually uh right on as far as what the uh what the technology had and what the problems would be in the future with it. And what it was after that then

Thionyl Chloride Challenges

SPEAKER_00 38:47

uh then in the late 70s we needed uh some batteries with higher rate capability for uh neurological devices such as uh things for pain relieving and drug pumps and things like that and we started working on lithium thionochloride and there was a company in Boston called uh BEI or battery engineering incorporated and we were originally thinking of buying batteries from them but we found the batteries were left a lot to be desired as far as reliability intermittent performance high self-discharge just a not not reliable battery so we decided to make our own battery in-house and we incorporated an awful lot of innovations to make the battery practical and safe. One of the things was we put a polyether sulfone layer on the negative electrode and this sort of changed the morphology of the lithium deposit on the lithium electrode. Instead of getting this rock salt type deposit that leads to large voltage delay we got more of a like a fish scale thing on the coating on the more stable SEI that made it so we didn't have the high voltage delay we had uh lower self-discharge and uh it actually made the battery safer in that was almost like a like the gel that you have in a Le Clanche cell in that it uh made the separator impervious so you didn't get any uh carbon or something coming across to the uh to the lithium. It used uh an electrolyte of you know lithium thino chloride with lithium aluminum chloride and then the it had a uh cathode which was a porous carbon activated or um more like uh Schwinigan black or uh okay uh a carbon black carbon black yeah and the reaction products from the electrode form you know the lithium chloride in the in that electrode so in addition to balancing the stoichiometry of the lithium to thynochloride you also have to look at the amount of carbon that you put in the cells to so you have a surface that can uh can handle the reaction product.

SPEAKER_05 41:40

Our last guest was Eric Darcy from NASA and he he shared with us that the flashlight in the headlamp of the astronauts at NASA was a thianochloride cell. So I'm just thinking about that as you're saying that you know you didn't guys didn't consider it safe.

SPEAKER_00 42:00

It's just a bit of a you know well amusing the things that we did uh I we made it to a safe safe and reliable and predictable battery with I didn't go into all the things that we did. One of the problems that the with the BEI cell is that it had a the lithium pressed up against the can which made a local couple between lithium and the stainless steel so it led a corrosion couple right in the you know built into the battery which increased the rate of cell discharge which another thing that did it had a uh feed through which would code glass at lithium potential glass tends to be reduced the oxides and uh conductive layer goes across the glass and uh it you know would short the cell we developed way of protecting the glass so that uh that wasn't a problem. Later on we came up with other other glasses is that were more stable and uh also resulted in you know stable feed throughs for long time. The one of the problems with the lithium thionyl chloride cell is the rate capability. Yeah yeah you talked about this voltage delay can you explain that? What happens is with a device you when you want the current you've got to get it when you need it. With the voltage delay you all of a sudden open a circuit and nothing happens. The no current flows this layer of lithium chloride on the negative electrode uh blocks the flow until that film essentially cracks and get through again

Safer Thionyl Chloride Cells

SPEAKER_00 43:48

there diffusion will happen again. Right. Um and that was the problem in just about all the uh commercial thyno chloride batteries The other problem was the rate capability, or one of the problems was rate capability. What we did was we had a control carbon content or contact so that we limited the rate capability of the cell so it couldn't discharge high rates. And this was also very effective in making the cell much safer than it was. Right.

Helium Leak Testing Design

SPEAKER_00 44:27

Another thing that we did was one of the problems with the thinochloride cell is you how do you know that you really have a hermetic package? The if you had a small leak, the lithium chloride or chloride would, or corrosion products would block the leak, and you wouldn't really know that you have a leak until it is too late and you've got a a problem. What we did was we made the cell so that it was leak testable. What we did was uh put a double uh fill tube on the cell, so uh one fill tube where we closed off the lithium or the uh thinochloride, uh then a second feed through that or a second closure which uh closed the around that. Ins in that internal cavity we had a helium gutter to hold helium. So if there's a leak in our outer closure, there would be a helium gutter to hold that helium and we could leak test it. Uh we also you know tested our uh components, you know, the cell went before we made it, before we filled it with thinochloride to make sure that it was hermetic at that point.

SPEAKER_02 45:45

Let me make sure I got this. So you're saying you helium is like your canary in the coal mine. You put it in there inside, and if it leaks out, you're able to detect it. You know, it can leak through almost anything.

SPEAKER_00 45:55

Well, right. We have a uh we would test it in a leam helium leak detector. Sort of a uh mass detect mass spec that uh is selective to uh helium. Fascinating. Or tuned to helium. I've worked with another one that was I would worked with another one that was tuned to hydrogen. And uh.

SPEAKER_02 46:20

Yeah, that'll really leak. Probably impossible to stop that from leaking. Right, right. Yeah.

MnO2 Cells Saving Lives

SPEAKER_02 46:27

Uh after thionyl chloride, your next one?

SPEAKER_00 46:31

Uh another application was for lithium MO2, lithium manganese dioxide. We had some patients that were dying. Uh they could only you know live for a couple years or even less than a couple years. They were very short life expectancy. So we they needed a therapy which was have a little higher current than a pacemaker. So we made the uh lithium MNO2 cells. Some surprising things happened. Those patients were living years later. And one of the things that happens is we've got a we only planned on making this initial production run, but we had to get all those materials, the same materials again, to make them several years later, and then a second time several years later again, because the patients kept living. They uh not only uh improved their quality of life, but it also improved their longevity. And uh at the time we first were uh doing the battery, we knew it was going to, you know, make them live longer, but we didn't realize that it was going to allow them to live almost a normal life. Wow, that's wonderful.

SPEAKER_05 47:54

I mean, that must have felt amazing.

SPEAKER_00 47:57

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's one of the things that made uh awful lot of the employees at Medtronic of very quality conscious and paid a lot of attention, realizing what it did for their patients.

SPEAKER_02 48:14

Right. Do

Testing Timelines And Licensing

SPEAKER_02 48:15

you remember uh like uh the first chemistry there where you where you were kind of the key person on okay, this is the this chemistry is ready to go, we're gonna commercialize this and put this into an implanted device, and and uh were you nervous at all of like okay, no, by the way I'm the person who drove this and now it's going into a uh surgery.

SPEAKER_00 48:34

No, by the time that it goes into a device, there's been l lots and lots of testing and uh Oh yeah, you should illustrate that.

SPEAKER_02 48:44

How many years of testing uh is there between between concept and uh it goes into a uh an implanted medical device for a battery chemistry?

SPEAKER_00 48:53

Uh it varies a lot. It has been getting shorter with uh some of the modeling that's going on now. With uh some of the earlier ones we would test for years before they actually went into a product. But now I think they I'm just guessing it because I don't know. Their turnaround time is much shorter because of the modeling that they can do with the uh with the cell chemistries.

SPEAKER_02 49:25

I see. But but I but like let's take the uh let's take the MNO2, the manganese dioxide. Um do you think from the time you started working with manganese dioxide before you decided to you know go commercial was like 10 years?

SPEAKER_00 49:38

Well that one that one was really wasn't commercials, that was more of a short production run to um meet the needs of these special customers or special patients um that uh started out as um for that reason rather than is more an emergency type thing than a uh so it at that time uh we did have years of testing with MNO2 though. Uh okay. I I built lots lots of MNO2 cells prior to that.

SPEAKER_02 50:14

That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 50:14

There were years years of testing at that time that we decided to do that.

SPEAKER_05 50:19

And you mentioned that lithium iodide was uh I think licensed from Great Batch. Correct. In the case of the thinochloride and the MNO2, were those developed internally?

SPEAKER_00 50:30

The lithium thinochloride, they were developed internally, but we licensed uh the Everider, EverReady, which is now energizer. Uh the key patent at that time was by George Blomgren, who did the lithium thinochloride system. So we licensed their technology and then we built on that. They also had very good uh lithium thinochloride cells that they they sold. But they weren't hermetic like ours were.

SPEAKER_02 51:03

And uh what came after uh manganese dioxide? What was the next chemistry you worked

Defibrillator Power Demands

SPEAKER_02 51:08

with?

SPEAKER_00 51:09

Um the then later in the 80s there started to be interest in defibrillators.

SPEAKER_02 51:18

And so that's where your uh that's not not your it's not a pacing issue of the heart. This is where your heart is needs uh is is going very rapid or yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:29

Right, it's uh sort of fluttering where it's doesn't have a good benefit or good beat, and uh if something doesn't happen, the patient is dead. If you've been in the seen the pictures on or some of the programs on TV where they put these paddles on a patient and uh give them the shock to uh bring the heart back. This device is like that, only it the electrodes are all internal and the device is internal. And so it senses when the heart goes into this type of arrhythmia and shocks it and brings it back to attention.

SPEAKER_05 52:08

Right. So how does that change the requirements on the battery?

SPEAKER_00 52:12

Um instead of uh you know, like a lithium iodine cell, you're talking uh milliamps, or I mean uh microamps, with you know, some of the M02 cells and the uh thinochloride cells, you know, we're talking in for you know pulses in the milliamp range. With the um defibrillator batteries, we're talking about uh uh watts, many watts of power being delivered. Uh what the battery does is it charges a capacitor, and then the capacitor develops a sh delivers the shock. You know, so we don't do you know charge it up to uh hundreds of volts, it's just the battery charges the capacitor, and that uh the capacitor is what delivers the shock to the patient.

SPEAKER_02 53:03

So it charges it up over a period of a few seconds or something like that? Correct, right. I see. And so you're dumping amps rather than milliamps and uh over a few seconds.

SPEAKER_05 53:14

Right?

SPEAKER_02 53:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 53:16

Okay, so much higher power requirements. Very much very much higher. The existing chemistries couldn't deliver that power, so you had to develop

SVO And Hybrid Cathodes

SPEAKER_05 53:26

something new.

SPEAKER_00 53:26

And we there again we've licensed Wilson Great Batch. They had a lithium-silver vanadium oxide uh couple, and it performed quite well for the application, and they were selling some to our competitors that were uh uh doing quite well with it, and so we licensed their technology and started developing our own batteries for with uh the silver vanadium oxide and uh considerable improvements on the technology that Wilson Great Batch had. And then uh we also continued with the made a change in the chemistry where we combined the silithium silver vanadium oxide with carbon monofluoride, and the combination of the two materials sort of gave the best properties of both. You get the very high capacity of the carbon monofluoride and you get the rate capability of the uh silver vanadium oxide. Because it's with the silver vanadium oxide, you uh have good rate rate capability right from the start.

SPEAKER_02 54:41

Uh I see. Yeah. So it's like a blend. It's just like you're saying you blend maybe two powders blended together and made into a a puck or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 54:50

Right. And it uh it performed very well and uh still performing well.

SPEAKER_02 54:56

So this is in use to this day? Yes. What's the electrolyte in that one?

SPEAKER_00 55:03

Oh, uh I believe it's uh um mostly PC DME. The uh the salt is one that uh creates some problem in that it's a uh would scare people if they knew what would what it was. It would say it's got a scary name. Uh I see lithium explorar arsenate. Uh right, right. And anything with arsenate is scary to uh any everybody. So uh but we've got a hermetic package and it's never sees the patient or the environment.

SPEAKER_05 55:36

I mean these chemistries all use lithium, right? I mean lithium is very reactive with water. These systems are very, very well sealed.

SPEAKER_02 55:44

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 55:45

Essentially we have a hermetic battery in a hermetic medical device.

SPEAKER_02 55:50

Right, two layers there. Right. You got the battery layer and then the outer layer of the device.

SPEAKER_00 55:56

So it'd be very difficult for any of these things to get to the patient.

Lithium Ion Transition

SPEAKER_02 56:01

Okay, so I think we've come to like the era where finally rechargeable batteries enter the scene for for for Medtronic.

SPEAKER_00 56:10

Uh you know, was there a what before that came in, were was there a a could a period where it was sort of considered and then finally like we gotta pull the trigger or how how did that in the 90s in the 90s we started working on rechargeable batteries thinking that they were with you know what was happening in Japan, they really were getting you know good results and uh it was pretty exciting. And so we did you do tear downs and look at how they were made? Oh yes, we we looked at how people were making their batteries and uh and we made a lot of laboratory cells ourselves and they performed quite well. Um but we decided to jumpstart our lithium ion technology by licensing a company called E1 Molly, which is in uh uh British Columbia.

SPEAKER_05 57:06

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so our first guest was actually Jeff Don, and he told us the the story of of Molly. Now, when you you said E1 Molly, so this would have been after their Taiwanese acquisition.

SPEAKER_00 57:20

Correct. When we went through a lot of negotiations and they were just very cooperative in teaching us uh the state of the art for lithium ion batteries. They had the same quality approach that we did. They realized that the patients were going to be dependent on these devices, and so they uh they took the time to do everything right and to make sure that we were aware of all the design rules to make a battery that was safe, reliable, and predictable. Uh they just uh great group of people. Do you remember who you worked with at Molly? Oh, there were a large number of people. Uh oh, uh uh Ulrich Von Saken? Von Saken was probably one of the main ones that we worked with. Yeah, and what was the uh what was the year the year of the acquisition? Do you remember that? Oh, it was uh somewhere around the year 2000 or thereabouts. Um we spent uh time at E1 Molly uh seeing how to do everything right. And uh when we set up our facility, we copied an awful lot of their equipment and suppliers and um ways of doing things. We just everything was on a much smaller scale. Our production was smaller than their production lines. But our interesting our our coding machine was probably uh very similar to their uh pilot line.

SPEAKER_05 59:02

The pilot line in Maple Ridge in British Columbia. Right. Okay. So that's interesting, this sort of knowledge transfer from MOLI to Medtronic.

SPEAKER_00 59:14

Uh without it, it would have been uh much harder to avoid pitfalls. Um there's uh awful lot of things that you can do wrong in making a battery. And uh we wanted to make sure that we didn't make those mistakes.

SPEAKER_05 59:34

Just so I get the timeline straight. So from the the 90s, so it's like 1990 to 2000, you guys are working internally on lithium ion, and then the year 2000, you license technology from Molly.

SPEAKER_00 59:47

Right. And started making that technology transfer and uh uh setting up production lines for making uh lithium ion cells at Mentronic.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:00

When was your first uh like product sold that had a lithium ion? Yeah. You know, I I worked with you from 2006-2010. I think it was well before that, so I think that's it. Yes, it was before it was before that. Maybe 2003 would have been my guess, but I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:17

Uh that is a reasonable guess. Um uh we got up and running well and we were getting uh uh good performance and uh it was doing everything we expected it to. And a lot of the problems that are inherent with uh uh lithium ion cells uh are problems that are common to anything with a active uh uh cathode, high voltage cathode. Right. And so that the so it it behaved, did everything we expected it to, and uh it was in a small package where it was uh just a fraction of the size of anything that uh Molly made. Ours was a very very small battery compared to uh theirs.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:12

Now the chemistry was graphite lithium cobalt oxide? Correct. Okay. And Molly would have been making cylindrical cells.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:20

Were you making cylindrical cells? No, we were making uh uh rect rectangular prismatic cells that would fit into the device. Um so they were essentially custom custom shapes. Okay.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:37

So you ended up licensing maybe the chemistry, some you know, cell balancing, cell design, and then coding and and so on, but then the cell assembly was completely distinct.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:48

And uh it's uh it's a lot different than uh um you know production facility. Right.

Implant Charging And Safety

SPEAKER_00 1:01:57

And these cells weren't implanted. Um they uh they are implanted, but they're not implanted for a life-sustaining application. They're implanted for neurological devices for relieving people's pain um and and things like that, where it's not uh they aren't dependent on it, but it uh improves their quality of life.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:20

And how did the patient charge the battery?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:24

Uh transdermally, you they've got a uh electrode that or that's um under the skin, uh part of a coil, and then you put the other coil on the skin, and it transmits the electricity or the power across the uh coil and it charges the wireless charging.

unknown 1:02:48

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:49

Wireless charging, just like you with your wireless charge for your phone. Right. We do it all the time now with a phone. Yeah, it's almost identical to what you do with the phone. Right. I remember those charging those chargers looking like uh like a uh a wrestler belt or something like a like a like a giant oh uh you're the world's champion wrestler belt with a really broad and a bucket.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:17

To uh to do it.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:19

Well uh I I you may be reluctant to uh relate this, but I I one of the topics that always comes up with with our guests is is that inevitably batteries are have they're dangerous. They have a lot of uh energy in a small place, and uh if you throw lithium into water, it'll start on fire. And um, you know, do you have any stories where you know all that lab work and all that development where you where you experienced anything like that, and if you could share anything particular like that?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:48

Um back when I was working with the thinyl chloride cell, I made some that were uh uh higher rate, where they had a expanded metal current collector rather than uh this controlled carbon contact, and shorted some of those out, uh essentially put them in between shot bags or sandbags, and then uh in a hood short them and uh have them uh explode. And uh uh one uh exploded went through the top of the hood and uh threw a light. So there's a was a there's a lot of a lot of power in any any battery. There's a lot of a lot of energy in a small package.

unknown 1:04:36

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:37

It went right through the the metal of the hood and through the light fixture. What what happened to you in that situation? Were you or were you out of harm's way?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:46

Well I I had the sash down when I was watching it and was uh just a little more energetic than I expected.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:53

Absolutely. Oh man. So do you remember sort of when that first lithium-ion battery got deployed into the field? Um, you know. Was there a party?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:07

Like what how

Qualification And Supply Chain

SPEAKER_00 1:05:08

did you feel? Well, I I was just glad to have it happen and uh yeah, we I think we were all felt good that it was happening because there was awful lot of work from a you know fairly big team that was involved in it. Um we had, you know, a a dozen people that were working on getting it from the uh well from the lab to uh to a production cell. And there was just a huge amount of qualification testing that is done. It's not like a manufacturing commercial manufacturing plant. Every piece of equipment's gotta be qualified and verified that it performs the same time after time after time, and you don't get any any differences. Even if you move a machine from one place to another you've got to repeat your your testing. So it's not only you test all your materials to make sure that they're meet requirements, you and your you test your subassemblies and you test every machine and operation that uh goes into it to make sure that you're getting a good consistent product that is the same from one unit to the next. Right. Most of the severe most of the operations that we were doing were s similar to what we did with some of the other lithium batteries. So the particulate contamination was an issue that we've been con we're concerned out about for years and uh you know had that wouldn't be like a uh another manufacturing plant starting up where they would have to deal with it at such a scale all at once where we were we were dealing with it in a dry room condition for years. So some things like that we were already up to speed on.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:09

Right. Were there any particular gotchas you know particularly challenges that came up that you remember?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:18

There's a lot of things that are unique to lithium ion batteries that are for implantable devices. The cells are hermetically sealed we discharge them under very controlled conditions, 37 degrees C. We charge them and discharge them at 37 C. If it's not at 37C there's bigger problems. And they're both charged and discharged at 37 degrees C under you know very controlled conditions where we control the the voltage that they are charged to and the amount of discharge very closely so that we keep things under in optimum ranges. The lithium ion batteries also have some unique problems. I mentioned before the uh uh small quantities that we manufacture batteries in that really created some problems with suppliers wanting to where they just didn't want to deal with us. And so uh we it took a lot of salesmanship to convince the suppliers that they were good people to work with even though we're a pain in the the tiny quantities that we need uh is where they're not making an awful lot of money but they uh saving lives that's uh that's part of the salesmanship that uh I think most of the suppliers come to realize that and uh it worked well they uh we have good suppliers and uh we seem to be able to keep a continuous supply of the same material for the life of the product. Of course if we can't get the product the product no longer can can be uh it's essential that we have the same same materials all the way through from development to early manufacturing to release in the field and every device that gets manufactured.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:33

Yeah and Eric Darcy from NASA was talking about how it with NASA they would buy large quantities of cells and then keep them in refrigerated storage and then be able to use the same cells for I don't know maybe 20 years or something like that. From the exact same lot that they're a manufacturing lot and so on. But I you know with Medtronic it would be would be more like raw materials. Did you ever have to buy you know a 10-year supply of raw materials?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:59

Yeah we had there's have been times where we've had to buy a large supply of this same material so that we would have that continuity of supply um other things you like foil and that type of thing well that there's an example of problems where where uh trying to get consistent copper foil can be a problem in that uh it's not only the thickness and the uh material content or the purity of the material uh of it it also any coating that's on that material can really make it difficult to to coat so we were we've had some problems of ensuring that we get uh foils that are coatable right have no oil on them or no residue or right yep yeah that did a lot of testing to make sure that the foils that we get you know will work when we do the uh the coating operations and all of our operations are so small with hand operations and many people handling things and uh many components that have to get put together by hand and and uh so many inspections all this things adds to results in a battery that is a lot more costly than uh what's being made in the by the millions right completely different cost profile than right than what would be made

Titanate Chemistry Breakthrough

SPEAKER_00 1:11:38

in Asia and there's one more uh chemistry I know because I was involved with it while I was there with you that um rechargeable chemistry that we we moved to what was that one? Well the one that we developed in-house was the lithium titanate with cobalt uh oxide is the positive um that cell has a lower energy density than the um graphite cell but it has a lot of other advantages that make it uh worth using for implantable devices um one of the things that can go wrong with uh lithium batteries in general is getting lithium deposited or lithium dendrites formed in a cell with the lithium titanate that's not a problem you're far away from the lithium potential and it just isn't going to happen so it's uh one of the potential hazards of the uh lithium ion batteries doesn't exist with the titanate and so most of the if not all of the uh neurological devices that we're making right now are using the lithium titanate batteries these are typically fairly small batteries uh but are very reliable and they have a very long cycle life cycle life yeah um the modeling and testing that we've done uh we were told not don't tell anybody how long these things are going to last nobody will believe that they can last that long and um uh with the hermetic seal and this chemistry uh the life expectancy of the battery is longer than the patient yeah that's a good way to summarize longer than the patient and then there's the zero volt uh protection as well can you explain that oh um when uh if you uh discharge a lithium cobalt battery or any essentially any lithium ion battery and you discharge it all the way when you get to uh zero volts you've got all sorts of corrosion reactions that are taking place you've got copper foil that is corroding you've got the lithium cobalt oxide or whatever positive electrode you have uh below its decomposition potential uh so you get uh you loss of capacity of the cell from both corrosion some of the corrosion that goes on goes on to the negative electrode and makes that degrades that also so when that happens you have all sorts of degradation reactions that can take place in the cell with the potential of the uh titanate even on fully charged you don't hit potentials that'll give you a problem and all the way to discharge you're above the point where you get the problems with the materials. In some designs uh even the uh potential problems with uh case material uh go away that's a another nice feature of the the chemistry it it has a really high rate capability also we don't take advantage of that uh but it makes it easy to to charge and the material is quite a bit different in that it doesn't have all the large dimensional changes that you have with some of the other intercalation compounds in that uh when you intercalate uh lithium into the titanate it really doesn't change dimensions very much it stays uh pretty close to the same dimension so you don't get the uh string related uh degradation mechanisms right so the the cycle life in going from the graphite lithium cobalt oxide to the lithium titanate lithium calt oxide the cycle life improved right I don't think we ever I don't know if any devices ever reached the end of life with the uh lithium cobalt oxide but with the titanate I'm don't think that'll happen or be able to happen.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:08

Yeah that's really cool. I mean that's a that's a great uh a great story and and and it's uh it's interesting how it it's really valuable in an implanted medical device and you know and not really used significantly outside of that not really used in you know commercial electronics or cars or things like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:26

There was a uh Professor Azoku at uh Osaka City University who I I consider a great electrochemist and uh he did some work with the lithium titanate. I'm not sure what his positive material was but he made car batteries with uh lithium titanate so he was essentially able to replace the lead acid battery with a battery that didn't have near the problems of maintenance and everything that a uh lead acid battery has uh with the uh lithium titanate.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:05

That's interesting because what ended up happening in the market now is that the lead acid replacement cells are all LFP graphite. So instead of you know what what the market ended up deciding is instead of doing a a negative and a cathode that are both relatively high it was actually to you know in the case of LTO or lithium titanate and lithium cobalt oxide the market actually went towards graphite and lithium iron phosphate with our both which are both lower with respect with respect to lithium potential. But also cheaper right so it was a it was a cost a cost play.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:43

Yeah lithium titanate is isn't a cheap material it uh it requires very controlled synthesis it's not as easy to synthesize as a lot of materials and it's not a so it's not cheap yeah it's probably also a relatively uh challenging supply chain yes there are very few suppliers in the world to supply the lithium titanate yeah but just to echo sort of what Kevin said I mean it's really cool because you you guys actually landed on a lithium chemistry which is very unique.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:13

I mean I don't I don't know that anybody else makes an an LTOLCO cell um and it's really sort of tuned to the you know the the constraints of your application of the implantable medical device.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:28

Right it it really has the reliability and performance that's needed for a medical device I'm pretty happy with the way things went with that development.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:40

Yeah.

North America Battery Outlook

SPEAKER_05 1:18:41

Zooming out a little bit you know one one of the we kind of always ask um our guests about their perspective on lithum ion production in North America in the case of Medtronic a little bit of a unique situation where maybe cost is not as much of a constraint and control of quality is an absolute must and then so you end up having pressure to vertically integrate. But in other industries maybe you don't have those constraints what do you think about lithium ion production in a more general sense in North America given your experience?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:23

I I'm afraid that things are going an awful lot slower than what I was hoping for. I think they they were trying to get uh suppliers up to speed I think the way that it is happening is the um manufacturers from the Orient are coming in and essentially doing teaching the people in the US how to make lithium ion batteries uh people from Taiwan and from uh South Korea are uh doing a lot of work to uh make that happen in the US and uh same with uh raw material suppliers there are uh people that are trying to get up to speed to manufacture uh uh electrolytes for lithium ion batteries in uh in a couple different states and so I think it's slowly happening it's just happening at a slower pace than what I was hoping for.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:30

Yeah I was really struck by your comment about funding for energy being cut in the 80s you know maybe there's some echoes of that now.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:41

Unfortunately I think that's true.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:43

Any sort of insights you think are are uh particularly applicable?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:48

I think the tide is going that way the rest of the world is becoming more energy efficient I think the US is going to follow through I think uh like Canada I think is moving towards more electric vehicles and I see that happening to the US in the US we went to the Cadillac type EVs I think the rest of the world is going to more the Volkswagen type uh EV that uh everybody's going to be able to afford yeah yeah it's interesting it does look like the growth and EV demand is definitely slowed in uh the US but not at all slowed in Europe or Asia yeah so um you know another thing that's interesting to reflect on is uh you know the whole um thinking about back to the beginning of our conversation about how you knew from the time you were six you're interested in chemistry which most six year olds don't really have but but it can be valuable to sort of uh reflect a little bit on like uh you know if you ran into a 16 year old who was curious about batteries or even a 22 year old uh you know what kind of thoughts you would share with them I think with uh electricistry um there's just huge opportunities um you know we've had tremendous progress in the last 50 years and I'm sure it's going to happen again in the next 50 years. You know there might be setbacks like we're having right now but uh the long-term trend is going to be to continual improvement in uh in batteries and different chemistries uh and technologies to make them better and safer and uh useful for more things.

Future Of Energy Storage

SPEAKER_05 1:22:48

So one thing that's interesting to me is that you've had this really long career 60 years of of looking at all these different chemistries these different electrochemical couples and as we look back it's like every decade there's these new chemistries and then you hit the 90s and it's kind of been for the last 30 years it's kind of been lithium ion and it's the same usual suspects over and over and I'm curious in your comment about you know there's gonna be a lot of things to look forward to where do you see the most promise where energy storage is going I I think the incremental improvements are are going to continue for the next decade.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:38

But uh there's going to be some new batteries that we're not even dreaming about right now that are going to happen. I don't think we've reached what we're capable of yet. I don't we're not anywhere near any type of theoretical limit. What happens with lithium metal uh I think I think that might not be as fast a coming as a lot of people think but I it's going to happen. It's just uh I think there's an awful lot of potential problems there that uh still need to get addressed. Um I believe when we get to uh some of these when they talk about uh solid state cells I think we'll eventually get to some good uh fast ion conductors that will allow batteries to be charged and discharged fairly rapidly with uh very low uh heating of the cell um I think we'll develop the infrastructure for charging these batteries uh where it'll be easy for people to do it everywhere where it's right now if you have an electric vehicle it can be a uh pain going s to some places where you're where there isn't much of a infrastructure for handling uh uh rechargeable batteries. Um I think we're going to have a lot better uh distributed energy systems in the grid where we'll have uh storage up near the uh users where um renewables can be used and the energy can be stored and generated at a relatively low cost and then delivered to the customer. Way back in the 70s uh there were the start of that with the in California with the what they call the best the battery engineering uh test station and there they were doing uh lead acid batteries and they had plans for looking at several other battery chemistries to see how they would be for load leveling and that uh that's now getting attention again I think the some of the flow batteries and that type of thing where we don't have the weight and uh volume considerations uh are going to be very efficient and long life and low cost um we'll allow some of that to happen.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:29

Wow that sounds great well Bill um yeah I mean thank you for for ending us on such a hopeful and optimistic note you know you've yeah absolutely you've had an in incredible career covering so many chemistries and and technologies and you're unique you know you're really uniquely positioned to be able to to make that judgment.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:57

Yeah yeah this was great we really appreciate it uh sharing all the the the this wide range of of chemistries and and and even the perspective over the time and you've done a great job of pulling it all together.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:10

Thanks a lot Bill Battery potential is produced by Cyclical a battery consulting and services company headed by Vincent Chevry and Larry Krauss music is a big flavor