Advanced Liquid Metal Battery system heads for commercialization
Electronic product development company Nuvation Engineering helped Ambri to develop, customize and scale-up the battery management system that aims to reduce power prices and increase system reliability.
The inventor of the core technology for the battery is Don Sadoway, MIT professor of materials chemistry, who based the Reversible Ambipolar Electrolysis technology after being inspired by the economy-of-scale of modern electrometallurgy and the aluminum smelter. Sadoway used seed money from within MIT to invent the liquid metal battery. In 2012 Ambri raised $15 million in Round B funding from Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates and energy company Total.
Ambri claims that the company’s development cells have achieved a DC-to-DC efficiency of 80 percent at a five-hour charge/discharge rate and an AC-to-AC efficiency of 70 percent to 75 percent.
Ambri’s innovative battery chemistry consists of earth-abundant materials and is designed to provide a low cost solution to the challenge of intermittent power availability in regions with wind and solar resources.
Ambri has been working on contructing the company’s first scaled 20-kilowatt-hour unit featuring one thermal chamber containing more than 400 cells and plans to introduce 35-kilowatt-hour commercial units in 2015. A larger system will reach 200 kilowatt-hours in 3 cubic meters.
“The Liquid Metal Battery is an innovative solution that is unlike any other storage technology commercially available or in development today,” claimed Dr. Donald Sadoway, Ambri’s Chief Scientific Advisor. “It can be used in a multitude of applications on the electric power system to integrate renewable resources, reduce costs and improve reliability. Dr. Sadoway pioneered Liquid Metal Battery technology at MIT with David Bradwell, a Ph.D student at the time and now CTO and SVP of Commercialization at Ambri.
“We approached Nuvation when our product development had advanced to the point where it was time to build and operate larger systems – this required a BMS that more closely resembled what would be deployed in the field,” explained Dr. Bradwell. “We were looking for an engineering firm that possessed both electronic design and BMS expertise. Nuvation’s structured approach and relevant experience was essential to developing a custom BMS that met all our needs; it immediately became an invaluable tool in this very exciting phase of our product development.”
“Since Ambri’s Liquid Metal Battery is still in development, they needed a BMS that could combine the standard monitoring and diagnostics functions of an off-the-shelf BMS with the flexibility to test a variety of configurations and cell interactions.” said Michael Hermann, Vice-President of Engineering at Nuvation.
A pilot project in Hawaii will have two cores installed this year in partnership with First Wind and HECO. Another project at Joint Base Cape Cod will see deployment of a 35-kilowatt-hour prototype to improve grid security and reliability.
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