Sumitomo Electric, a Japanese-based company, has developed a new material called Aluminum-Celmet. The material is being adopted as a current collector for positive electrodes of lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs), to improve its capacity. Aluminium-Celmet is an improvement over the Sumitomo Electric’s Nickel-Celmet. It is a metal made from aluminum alloys, with 98 per cent porosity and features a three-dimensional mesh-like structure that forms interconnected, open and spherical pores. It is easy to process the porous metal into various shapes by cutting and stamping. These features increase current-collecting performance, when used with an active material. Aluminium-Celmet, when used in lithium-ion batteries, improves their capacity by 1.5 to three times, and therefore lengthens the range of EVs by 50 per cent to 200 per cent. That would give EVs like Nissan LEAF a range of 175km to 352 km and Tesla Roadster a range of 589km to 1,178 km.
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