By Kyle Proffitt
April 10, 2026 | There were five keynote presentations at the International Battery Seminar & Exhibit this year, featuring seasoned academic pioneers, major battery manufacturers, and a leading automotive company. A through-line for their presentations involved response to the external pressures of Chinese manufacturing prowess and shifting consumer demands/government incentives. We’ll hear first from the academics with laboratory-level efforts toward cutting costs without sacrificing performance and how these chemistry decisions will help steer the ship in the next decade.
Jeff Dahn: ‘Boring’ LFP?
Professor Dahn used his time this year to scrutinize lithium iron phosphate (LFP)-based batteries. While LFP proves good enough for many uses, given its lower price, Dahn says the lifetime of LFP batteries remains an issue, and that’s a problem for its increasing use in stationary storage. “I’m sure that the LFP lifetime is still worse than the [nickel-manganese-cobalt oxide] NMC,” Dahn said. The villain, he says, is a series of events—with iron playing a crucial role—leading to lithium inventory loss. First, lithiated graphite forms, as desired, upon battery charging. This lithiated graphite reacts with electrolyte to create lithium alkoxides, which is also a normal, desirable process, creating the solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI) that protects the electrolyte from further decomposition.
However, Dahn showed through a series of experiments and publications that these alkoxides can get back to the cathode, where they promote iron dissolution. “The iron migrates to the graphite, deposits there, compromises the SEI, and causes more rapid capacity fade,” Dahn explained. “So preventing this crosstalk is essential for enabling long LFP lifetime.” Dissolved iron plates on the graphite, where it acts catalytically to cause further SEI thickening, which means lithium loss. Less lithium to cycle, less capacity, and it only gets worse with heat. Furthermore, “the failure of LFP cells at elevated temperatures is dominated by time and exposure,” Dahn explained, meaning that sitting at 40 °C can cause damage even when the battery isn’t cycling. Most of the data he showed involved C/3 charge and discharge; Dahn said 1C data might look better, but only because you’re effectively beating the clock, getting cycles in before time catches up.
This has real-world consequences. Field data from Zenfinity Energy, a supplier of LFP packs for electric two- and three-wheelers in South Asia, illustrated the stakes. Cells in New Delhi were experiencing ambient temperatures around 30°C with internal temperatures climbing 12 degrees higher during discharge, putting them routinely in the 40–42°C range. Standard LFP cells, Dahn observed, struggle to deliver more than a few years of viable life under those conditions.
The solution his group has pursued is electrolyte optimization, specifically the use of vinylene carbonate (VC) additives. Adding VC at up to 5% dramatically slows iron migration to the negative electrode. In a clean experiment using identical cells and conditions except for swapping NMC and LFP, he showed that VC only helps with LFP, because the metals in NMC cathode do not dissolve like iron.
The graphite quality is also critical. “The choice of electrolyte, the choice of graphite, everything matters,” Dahn said. Graphites with fewer electrochemically active surface sites passivate more effectively and lose less lithium inventory over time, he explained. Using this well-passivated graphite (with undisclosed electrolyte additives) and optimized VC levels, Dahn’s lab has produced cells tracking an extrapolated 10 years to 80% capacity at a continuous 40°C. This is a significant improvement, but he is not completely satisfied: “Still only 10 years, right–still want to be better.” That’s because NMC variants, operated with a reduced voltage window, still surpass our best LFP in energy density, and “have incredible lifetime” exceeding that of LFP. In 2023, he was reporting 16,500 cycles, which could mean 45 years in a grid storage application.
On energy density, Dahn showed that adding 20% silicon-carbon composite to the LFP anode can deliver roughly a 13% energy gain, but with tradeoffs. At elevated temperatures, silicon-containing cells degrade faster with standard electrolytes. His group has identified alternative electrolyte formulations that bring silicon-LFP performance close to graphite-only baselines. The implication is that LFP cells with silicon anodes and purpose-built electrolytes could close a significant portion of the energy density gap with NMC while retaining LFP’s safety and cost advantages.
“What more important problem [is there] for battery science to work on than to be improving LFP?” Dahn asked, because LFP is now everywhere.
Shirley Meng: The Sodium-Ion Bet and the ESRA Agenda
Professor Meng delivered her first International Battery Seminar keynote address as director of the Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA), a $62.5 million, five-year DOE Office of Science initiative supporting 45 principal investigators and 90 students and postdocs across the country. She’s betting on sodium as the best candidate for the next terawatt-hour technology—complementing but in no way replacing lithium-ion. “We have picked sodium electrochemistry as our top choice to create an innovative ecosystem that enables discovery in materials chemistry through fundamental understanding of ion-matter interactions in electrochemical phenomena,” Meng said.
As usual, Meng reminded the audience of the bright and “unstoppable” future of electrification. Despite what you might read in the news, she said, battery demand is up, led by a nearly 50% increased demand for LFP batteries. Although the EV picture is less rosy in North America, roughly one of every two new cars in China is an EV. Meanwhile, data centers with battery needs are coming up everywhere, and drones and humanoid robots are accelerating.
According to Meng, a few primary factors are converging to help sodium-ion mature, including artificial intelligence, advanced diagnostic technologies, and improved collective knowledge in specific areas such as superionic conductivity and the solvation architecture of liquid electrolyte. For AI, she pointed to a new facility at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory—MIRAIL, the Materials Innovations through Robotics and AI Lab—where researchers can now synthesize, assemble, and electrochemically test 200 to 300 samples per day, compared to the two or three that would have been possible by hand. Researchers can also query the system for a hypothetical such as “candidate electrolytes to cycle at ‑40°C” and let AI guide the synthesis. Meng stated that this requires a model context protocol connecting large language models directly to lab hardware. She foresees greater collection of AI-ready data from member labs accelerating discovery.
A second major development is exemplified by the $800 million upgrade of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, making it the world’s most coherent and brilliant X-ray source. Meng shared unpublished data from Dr. Ben Huang showing real-time, non-destructive computed tomography of 100% silicon anodes in all-solid-state cells during operation. “We can predict where the cracks will form,” Meng said, “and each time, the crack formation is actually predictable in the 100% silicon anode cells.” She showed additional results from a cathode produced with a dry method and said that such measurements, obtained in just 7-10 minutes, will be vital for researchers to quantify porosity, tortuosity and other material properties.
In materials, Meng was quick to highlight that much is left to discover, especially for amorphous glassy materials. She pointed to computational work by Xuebing Ong, correctly predicting that amorphizing crystalline closo-borohydride compounds through heat treatment and rapid cooling would produce material with room-temperature ionic conductivity several orders of magnitude higher than the crystalline phases. Meng calls this superionic conductivity, and the material shows a transference number of one, meaning only the sodium ion moves and no anion polarization occurs.
Combined with dry electrode processing, warm isostatic pressing, and anode-free cell designs, this has enabled room-temperature sodium all-solid-state battery cycling at electrode loadings up to 5.5 mAh/cm², demonstrated at pellet-cell scale with pouch cells targeted within the year.
