Groundbreaking Battery Technology To Pave The Way For Mass Adoption Of Fast Charging Electric Cars

Clean Technica

Penn State has managed to make another breakthrough with their sustainable energy after they designed an electric vehicle fast charging battery that only has a 10-minute charge time for a typical EV battery.

This occurred after the engineers managed to make a record-breaking merger of ‘shorter charge time and more energy required for longer travel range’ by heating their battery to a Goldilocks Zone, which formerly was quite difficult for engineers all around.

These recent findings were shared on October 12, in Nature journal, in the hopes to further the sales of electric vehicles.


Lead author on the study and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Penn State, Chao-Yang Wang, said, “The need for smaller, faster-charging batteries is greater than ever.”

“There are simply not enough batteries and critical raw materials, especially those produced domestically, to meet anticipated demand,” he added.

Back in August, California’s Air Resources Board managed to pass their extensive plan to restrain and eventually ban the sale of gasoline powered cars within the state. The hope is that by 2035, the biggest auto market in the United States will successfully retire the internal combustion engine.

Penn State has managed to make another breakthrough with their sustainable energy after they designed an electric vehicle fast charging battery that only has a 10-minute charge time for a typical EV battery.

This occurred after the engineers managed to make a record-breaking merger of ‘shorter charge time and more energy required for longer travel range’ by heating their battery to a Goldilocks Zone, which formerly was quite difficult for engineers all around.

These recent findings were shared on October 12, in Nature journal, in the hopes to further the sales of electric vehicles.

Lead author on the study and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Penn State, Chao-Yang Wang, said, “The need for smaller, faster-charging batteries is greater than ever.”

“There are simply not enough batteries and critical raw materials, especially those produced domestically, to meet anticipated demand,” he added.

Back in August, California’s Air Resources Board managed to pass their extensive plan to restrain and eventually ban the sale of gasoline powered cars within the state. The hope is that by 2035, the biggest auto market in the United States will successfully retire the internal combustion engine.

PC

Wang also explained that should the new car sales manage to shift from the popular combustion engine vehicles to battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs), they will need to defeat two major setbacks. These are the issues of being too slow to recharge, and too large to be efficient and affordable. Unlike the usual gasoline vehicles, which only take a few minutes to fill up a gas tank, depending on the battery of some EVs, they can take an entire day to recharge.

Wang, whose lab partnered with State College-based startup EC Power to create this new technology also shared, “Our fast-charging technology works for most energy-dense batteries and will open a new possibility to downsize electric vehicle batteries from 150 to 50 kWh without causing drivers to feel range anxiety.”

He added, “The smaller, faster-charging batteries will dramatically cut down battery cost and usage of critical raw materials such as cobalt, graphite and lithium, enabling mass adoption of affordable electric cars.”

The technology works by being dependent on internal thermal modulation, which is ‘an active method of temperature control to demand the best performance possible from the battery,’ shared Wang.


Notably, batteries operate better when they are hot but not too hot. So by keeping these batteries at the right consistent temperature has truly been the major challenge for these battery engineers.

Throughout the years, scientists and engineers have mostly relied on external and bulky cooling and heating systems in order to best regulate the battery temperature. However, the issue with this is that they tend to respond slowly while also wasting a lot of energy.

What Wang and his team decided to do was rather than regulate the temperature from inside the battery, they chose to develop a new battery structure that ‘adds on ultrathin nickel foil as the fourth component besides anode, electrolyte and cathode.’

Working as a stimulus, the nickel foil works to self-regulate the battery’s temperature and reactivity, allowing for 10-minute fast charging on just above any EV battery, said Wang.

The researchers also share, “True fast-charging batteries would have immediate impact. Since there are not enough raw minerals for every internal combustion engine car to be replaced by a 150 kWh-equipped EV, fast charging is imperative for EVs to go mainstream.”

In addition, the study’s partner, EC Power, is also working to manufacture and commercialize this new fast-charging battery in order to make it both affordable and sustainable for the future of vehicle electrification.

 

 

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