The GMG battery maintains less than body temperature when charged and discharged over long periods, high speeds.

Following its successful production of a prototype 500 milliampere-hour graphene-aluminum battery, Graphene Manufacturing Group Ltd. (GMG) continues to demonstrate the performance of its potentially game-changing batteries compared to conventional lithium-ion. This includes keeping their cool during rapid charging and discharging.

Capitalizing on its proprietary graphene production method, GMG has explored various ways to implement its graphene in products that could see marked improvement through the use of this wonder material.

Lighter, thinner, and highly conductive, graphene has all the hallmarks of an ideal battery material. While before it was only a matter of time before technologies began utilizing graphene, now discoveries are so frequent, that it's become a matter of discovering its limits.

Heat factor

For one of its first tests, GMG examined the temperature of its battery and found minimal thermal increase when charging and discharging its graphene aluminum-ion battery.

Graphene Manufacturing Group Ltd.

Thermal image of lithium-ion battery (left), with thermal image of graphene aluminum-ion battery (right).

Batteries are typically trialed through simple observation of thermal measurement at various currents, or C rates, which corresponds to hours to fully discharge, i.e., 1 C is full discharge in one hour. GMG researchers used this first test to determine what a common lithium-ion battery was capable of.

Selecting a leading high-quality lithium-ion battery, which was not named, the company found it reached temperatures exceeding 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit) when discharged at its maximum capacity.

This maximum capacity is represented by a discharge rate of 4.8 C, which, in simpler terms means the battery releases its energy as quickly as possible in 4.8 hours. GMG also noted that the estimated rate at which this occurred was approximately 800 milliamps for every gram of cathode material, which provided insights into the battery's performance characteristics.

By comparison, the graphene aluminum-ion battery temperature reached roughly 29 degrees C (84.2 degrees F). Considering it was also discharged at nearly five times the capacity of the lithium-ion competitor, at 20 C and approximately two amps for every gram of cathode material, the difference becomes immediately evident.

Given the temperature performance, the company intends to validate with further testing the possibility that the graphene aluminum-ion battery may not need thermal management, even at high charge and discharge rates.

If so, this creates the potential for significant cost reduction in manufacturing if GMG can forego typical large systems like liquid cooling, heat sinks, or fans to maintain a stable temperature while in operation, which often account for nearly one-sixth the weight of electric vehicle battery packs.

Readiness level

Following the Battery Component Readiness Level framework, GMG estimates its current state puts it at Level 4, the initial scaling phase.

University of Münster; Matthew Greenwood et al

The Battery Component Readiness Level Framework.

However, once the commissioning of its pilot plant is in place, the company predicts jumping immediately into the final phase of scaling output for testing, placing it somewhere between Levels 7 or 8, since the equipment and process to manufacture graphene aluminum-ion batteries is the same as those used to produce lithium-ion batteries.

Until that point, further performance data will continue to be accumulated.

While it initially announced a 500 milliampere-hour battery, which is still a distance from common smartphone batteries that fall between 3,000 to 4,000 mAh, the company states that it is working toward the stable production of a 1,000 mAh battery pouch cell and will announce the success when it does.