How sulfur could be a surprise ingredient in cheaper, better batteries

Lyten has made progress in stretching the lifetime of its batteries, recently seeing some samples reach as high as 300 cycles, Mickolajczak says. She attributes the success to Lyten’s 3D graphene material, which helps prevent unwanted side reactions and boost the cell’s energy density. The company is also looking to use 3D graphene, a more complicated structure than the two-dimensional variety, in other products like sensors and composites.  

Even with recent progress, Lyten is still far from producing batteries that can last long enough to power an EV. In the meantime, the company plans to bring its cells to market in places where lifetime isn’t quite so important. 

Since lithium-sulfur batteries can be extremely lightweight, the company is working with customers building devices like drones, for which replacing the batteries frequently would be worth the savings on weight, says Keith Norman, Lyten’s chief sustainability officer. 

The company opened a pilot manufacturing line in 2023 with a maximum capacity of 200,000 cells annually. It recently began producing a small number of cells, which are scheduled for delivery to paying customers later this year. 

The company hasn’t publicly shared which companies will receive the first batteries.  Moving forward, two of the company’s main focuses are improving lifetime and scaling production of both 3D graphene and battery cells, Norman says. 

The road to lithium-sulfur batteries that can power EVs is still a long one, but as Mikolajczak points out, today’s staple chemistry, lithium-ion, has improved leaps and bounds on cost, lifetime, and energy density in the years that companies have been working to tweak it. 

People have tried out a massive range of chemistry options in batteries, Mikolajczak says. “To make one of them reality requires that you put in the work.”