VIEWS on BATTERY NEWS: Samsung SDI stock up. Li-crystal structure strong. Made in the Czech Republic.

Samsung SDI has had a lot to worry about this year. And Samsung stock certainly took a hit because of the Note7 debacle involved tightly with its battery arm. But Samsung and their battery arm Samsung SDI have come back from their stock slump and are back to their average price.

The reason for a return to normalcy is a combination of doubts about the battery arm being the cause of the Note7 fires. It is looking somewhat likely that the designers of the phone just didn't give the battery enough room. And because the separator in the battery was especially thin, the tight fit was too rough on the battery.

It would have been too rough on any battery, which could be why the replacement battery failed as well.

But there is more to the story. Samsung SDI hasn't been a money maker for the parent Samsung even before the Note7. The memory business of the highly diversified conglomerate company is doing very well. And their display business is also profitable, among other divisions.

Even with the big hit they took cleaning up the Note7 problem, Samsung SDI is already creating new contracts and trying to make its way into a solid position because batteries should be a great business in the future as demand has grown almost exponentially.





Dendrites are the bane of lithium batteries. They grow inside a cell as it is used and sometimes they get big enough to pierce through a separator causing a lack of performance and sometimes catastrophic failure.

So there has been a lot of research into how to stop them or mitigate them. That kind of study starts with understanding them. It turns out they dendrites are a great deal stronger than we first imagined.

This is bad news when it comes to what we wanted the outcome of the research to be. But it is good news in that knowing the true nature of the problem will help us combat it better.





The interesting thing about the Czech battery factory is that one normally doesn't build a factory if they don't have something to build. The company that has built a factory is HE3DA.

They claim they have a battery breakthrough that justifies the investment. They claim the battery they are manufacturing has a higher energy density at a lower cost. And that these are not just tiny advantages, but very large capacity increases at greatly reduced costs.

And the ability to charge and discharge is supposed to be enough for starter batteries and EVs. And they can create this all in a cell that is at least as safe as any chemistry that is around today.

We haven't had any independent reviews as of yet, but they should come soon enough.