Skip to main content

New battery design for electric cars would stack up to 1,000-km range

By

One of the big stumbling blocks preventing the wide scale acceptance of electric cars is dreaded range anxiety. With an average range of around 100 mi (161 km) per charge, all-electric vehicles still can't compete with more conventional cars – especially if lights, windscreen wipers, or air con are needed. To level the playing field a bit, Fraunhofer is working on a new battery design that could increase an electric car's range to 1,000 km (621 mi).
Electric cars don't have a single battery, but a collection of battery packs made of hundreds or thousands of individual battery cells that are packed in and wired together. These separate battery cells each require a housing as well as terminals, wiring, cables, and electronic monitors, which all combine to take up 50 percent of the space of a whole battery pack. Additionally, all those electrical connections sap away current through resistance.
In partnership with ThyssenKrupp System Engineering and IAV Automotive Engineering, the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems IKTS in Dresden is developing EMBATT, a new type of battery that reduces the number of those components in a much simpler design that would free up space that could be used to provide extra electricity storage capacity.
EMBATT takes its cue from another electrical power source, the fuel cell. Fuel cells work by combining oxygen with a gas, like hydrogen or methane, across a permeable membrane, to generate electricity. One key component of such cells is what is called a bipolar plate. This plate covers both sides of the cell and has a number of functions, but its main purpose is to act as the electrodes to collect the electricity produced by the cell with one plate acting as the anode and the other as the cathode.
Fraunhofer's idea is to replace the housings and individual connectors in the battery packs with similar plates. Instead of setting the battery cells next to each other, they would be stacked directly one on top of one other over a large area and covered by plates, which would carry the current across its surface. This would not only simplify the design, but greatly reduce resistance, making more electricity available more quickly.
In the Fraunhofer design, this bipolar plate is in the form of a metallic tape that's coated on both sides with a powdered ceramic mixed with polymers and electrically conductive materials. The ceramic acts as an energy storage medium, with one side of the tape acting as the anode and the other as the cathode depending on the formulation of the coating. Fraunhofer says that this arrangement would allow for easy manufacturing and long service life.
The upshot of all this is that electric cars could carry bigger batteries that don't takes up more space or add weight, giving cars a range of 1,000 km (621 mi) in the medium term.
So far EMBATT has been confined to the laboratory, but the partners are working on scaling up the technology for installation in test vehicles by 2020.
Source: Fraunhofer
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

10 URLs to Find Out What Google Knows About You

By
Google is much more than just a search giant. It is also home to many of your favorite products: Gmail, YouTube, and Chrome, just to name a few. Apart from that, it also offers many products to help you  keep track of your data . Most of these are  hidden deep  inside the My Account dashboard, which many users don’t really know of. These hidden tools  may reveal interesting details  about your usage of Google’s many services. We’ve compiled a list of important Google URLs of some  hidden tools  that carry information of what you did with Google, mostly from the searches that you have made on their many products, the voice searches and typed out Google searches that you have made. Are you ready to  find out what how Google knows about you ? 1.  Google Dashboard Google Dashboard offers  transparency and control over the personal data stored with your Google Account. You can  view  and  manage the data gener...
Post a Comment
Read more

Wind Turbines

By
The Bahrain World Trade Center is the first skyscraper to have wind turbines integrated into the structure of the building.Three large wind turbines are suspended between two office towers. The towers are aerodynamically tapered to funnel wind and draw air into the turbines. This airfoil tapering allows the wind to enter the turbines at a perpendicular angle and increases air speed as much as 30 percent in each of the 95 ft wide turbine rotors. The turbines supply about 15 percent of the electricity used by the skyscraper - approximately the same amount of electricity used by 300 homes. Source: www.norwin.dk
Post a Comment
Read more

Edible water balloons that could get rid of the need for plastic bottles

By
In case you didn’t know, bottled water is destroying the planet. We know that we need to be drinking plenty of water. It’s important. But the plastic bottles they’re sold in are terrible for the environment. One solution is using reusable bottles that you can fill from any nearby taps instead of buying a new bottle each time. Another solution is much more exciting. A group of engineers from Skipping Rocks Lab have developed a wonderful thing called The Ooho!. It’s a globe filled water that you can pop in your mouth whole. The outer shell is made of algae, so it’s edible and biodegradable. Meaning there’s no need for packaging or plastic – the globes of water are self-contained and ready to consume. Exciting, right? Plus they’re wobbly and they look cool, which is always a bonus. The team have now created a crowdfunding page to make their creation available to the public, with goals of selling The Ooho! at festival and marathons within the next 12 m...
Post a Comment
Read more