Prof. Dr. Maximilian Fichtner

Prof. Dr. Maximilian Fichtner is Chemist and director at the Helmholtz-Institute Ulm for Electrochemical Energy Storage (HIU), he is professor for Solid State Chemistry at the Ulm University and head of the department “Energy Storage Systems” at the Institute for Nanotechnology of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

Fichtner is scientific director of CELEST (Center for Electrochemical Energy Storage Ulm-Karlsruhe) and spokesperson of the German Cluster of Excellence “Energy Storage Beyond Lithium” (POLiS). He is also member of the core team of a new European flagship on battery research named “BATTERY2030+” and has been co-ordinator of various collaborative projects on battery- and hydrogen technology.

His research interests are raw materials and sustainability issues. new principles for energy storage and the synthesis and investigation of related materials.

Fichtner is author and co-author of approx. 400 publications, conference- and book contributions, 20 patents and editor of a book on magnesium batteries.

The strong increase in the demand for powerful batteries in automotive and stationary applications has raised the question, whether the materials supply for the batteries is standing on a sufficiently firm and sustainable basis. Hence, a part of the current research and development focuses on efforts to replace critical raw materials by more abundant, less toxic and readily available elements.

Recently, new battery pack designs (so-called “Cell-To-Pack” designs) have opened new opportunities to integrate 20-50% more active material of one electrode in the battery pack, which is substantial. Hence, also light and less dense cathode materials can be considered for automotive applications such as FePO4, which is very safe, cheap and free of cobalt and nickel. Thus, the supply risk and cost are considerable reduced and the sustainability, safety and durability can be considerably enhanced by this new technology. The first electric cars based on such designs have already been commercialized in 2020 (BYD model HAN, TESLA model 3 in China), some have been already announced in Dec. 2020 (Volkswagen), others may follow.

While this seems to be a well-working potential solution for the cathode composition, still lithium is needed for those batteries. It should be noticed that, in addition to automotive applications, there is also a dramatically rising demand for stationary battery systems (38% growth per year), with a projected total capacity of > 1 TWh in 2031. Therefore, it may be necessary to replace also Li by other, more abundant elements such as Na, Mg, Al, Ca etc. The work on such systems is in progress, the performance does not reach that of the Li-ion batteries, yet, but first Na ion batteries have already reached a high degree of maturity and have been commercialized in 2020.