Currently most so called high end suppliers for round cells LiIon are not able to supply to the general market as they are focusing on the automotive market. When talking about the automotive market we are not only talking about demand for traction batteries, but also batteries for other functions like E-Call are considered. Especially for the EV market there are some developments for higher capacity cells with bigger dimensions. Besides the old standard 18650, in the meantime very popular is the 21700 size and in the future this may change to 46800 cells. But not only dimension wise there will be important developments, also the chemical system will change from standard old cobalt systems to currently NCA system with Sio2 in the future. We will give you some overview about the development of these sizes and different chemical systems.
But what about alternative Chinese suppliers for the automotive and of course also for the general market ? We will provide some Benchmarking test results of different alternative sources for LiIon round cells where we compare these sources in regard to capacity, impedance, rate capability, cycle life and storage performance. But we are not focusing on these performance parameter alone, we are also looking into the distribution and tolerances of these parameters.
Besides traction there are also other applications important for the automotive market. While especially for entertainment applications the trend is to use Lithium Polymer batteries, there are still applications like E-Call where still LiIon round cells are required. Also for these applications there is a trend to move to Chinese suppliers, not only due to cost reasons, but also due to logistic reasons. We will represent some alternatives which will substitute the current Tier 1 suppliers.