No, IMO they don’t.
Only a tiny percentage of cell tech advances make it out of the lab and only a tiny percentage of those are successfully commercialized. This company has had this tech for over three years and AFAIK it has not made it into any commodity (widely used) cells. If it had the companies would have advertised it like crazy.
This is an advancement suitable only for niche applications. The current collectors for their cells use vapor deposited metal (onto plastic) instead of sheets of metal foil. These layers of deposited metal are incredibly thin. They have to be in order for the plastic layer to be able to pull the metal back and away from a high temperature area (where a short circuit occurred).
This much, much thinner layer of metal means the cell’s internal resistance has gone up and the current handling has gone down. These cells will probably only be high capacity and low current rated.
How about the cost too? This metallized plastic current collector material will cost a lot more than metal foil.
This new metallized current collector need to be connected to the metal tabs that carry the current to the top and bottom of the cell internally. But now instead of just one tab we need two, one for each side of the current collector material. This increases cost and may require new equipment, adding even more to the cell’s cost.
Can we even reliably connect to a layer of metal so thin we could probably see through it? Only particular types/shapes/sizes of cells might be suitable for this tech.
Their polymer separator uses a non-woven material that seems to claim it doesn’t pull back from a hot area where a short has occurred. There are other advancements in separator tech that can either help minimize problems if runaway starts or even help to prevent it in the first place. How expensive is Soteria’s material compared to the others? How thick is it? Do we have to sacrifice capacity for a thicker material? Is ion mobility affected? What about cost?
There are literally a bunch of battery tech announcements made every day. Almost none of them will ever be used in a commercially available cell. We have to realize that what we have in the cells we use now is all that survived the commercialization process for all the big battery tech discoveries announced years ago. Sure, there have been some genuine advancements like nano-materials, fire retardant electrolyte additives, better performing anode and cathode active materials, etc.
But hundreds and hundreds of other advancements never made it to market. They were either too expensive, required too much of a change to the existing manufacturing processes, or compromised capacity or performance too much to make the cell commercially viable for the markets they would be sold to.
I don’t think there’s a place for Soteria’s tech in the ”commodity” low cost cells that esk8 uses. I think Samsung, Sony, LG, Panasonic, Sanyo, or Molicel would have adopted it a long time ago if there was.
As brought up earlier by @BenjaminF, how common are short-circuits cause by puncture or crushing? Much more common are issues caused by misuse and not mishandling. Things like overcharging, charging when cold, soldering heat damage, use of salvaged cells, high discharge current rates, overdischarging, etc., are much more common causes of thermal runaway (or just benign cell failure).
Do we really need Soteria’s tech?
Or do we just need better education of the esk8 community?
Would we pay the price, literal and figurative, to use Soteria’s tech if it actually made it to a cell we could use? Higher cost cells and perhaps reduced ratings too?