The real claim is 10 minute charging of lithium-ion batteries with a process which is a minor mod to existing battery production.
There's no product yet.
Batteries with good low temp behavior have many specialized uses.
Things that have a small solar panel, a battery, and no grid connection could benefit from this. Even flashlights could use this.
> Things that have a small solar panel, a battery, and no grid connection could benefit from this.
As a side topic, what are the currently available options for this?
I've heard about sodium ion (safer but still not sub-zero charging friendly, also no easily available solar charging controller boards), lithium titanate (same), and plain old deep-cycle lead acid.
For small solar-powered projects, it would be nice if there was a power bank on market which supported solar charging, and could either be safely charged in freezing temperatures, or had built-in temperature sensor and reject charging when it's too cold.
Not for cars yet, but Enovix has short-ion-path batteries intrinsic to its lithrographed 3D design. Performance is quite something: https://www.enovix.com/products/
The big news on EV charging is from BYD in late March when they announced (and it caused TSLA to fall by a few percent) that their new line of superchargers will be able to charge cars to give them a range of 400 km in just a few minutes. This is the state of the art in production
The state of the art (not just for BYD) is to make sure you don't have to charge a cold battery by getting it to the right temperature before charging. One of the reasons that Tesla (and others) has navigation integrated into trip planning integrated into the vehicle is so that the battery temperature can be optimized in the 10 minutes before you start charging, to maximize charging speed.
BYD would not pump 400 kW into a battery at -10 C. This research helps in the situation where you have a cold battery, and need to start charging it before it can warm up.
They are expanding in Europe rapidly, and in China of course.
In the Netherlands they are partnered with a local green electricity provider (Vattenfall) and Shel for their charger network. Shell owns the most petrol stations along the highways, so they will have their chargers there for sure.
I'm expecting the tariffs on Chinese EVs to be rolled back in EU after the US tariffs. They might want BYD to open local factories, like NIO is planning to do.
The battery can be large enough that it takes a long time to heat it, but that's usually what an EV is doing when it preconditions the battery for charging. My car (and pretty much all EVs) will precondition the battery if the next navigation stop is a charging station, for example.
This assumes that nav data is current or a telematics subscription is active. As Alec Watson of Tech Connections fame recently pointed out about his first-gen IONIQ 5, this needs to be feature accessible to the driver.
This pre-conditioning isn't free. It costs you range. So, doing less of that helps. And it takes time. The worst case for an EV is a short journey to a fast charger. Both heating the vehicle and the battery from ice cold takes energy.
Many EVs (Teslas) already contain a heat pump to warm the battery. I presume that improved battery chemistry would supplement this -- but maybe replacement would be possible?
Not a battery expert but part of the challenge is too much heat in some places, not enough in others, so heat management is a big challenge, but coolant routing is complicated. The heat pump is a big deal and far more efficient (4x?) than a 'block heater', and resistance heat is the old solution that the industry moved away from.
I believe the "microscale channels" are a better solution that reduces the amount of heat generated at the connection points of the battery, and also reduces the high temperature gradient at high voltage charging at low internal temps (high internal temperature delta), which I understand to be a primary cause of battery degradation.
At least in my car, fully preconditioning the battery can take an hour or two when it's really cold. If you're still on the way to the charging station, it can also impact your range. My car is annoyingly conservative about when it uses and disabled the preconditioning
While the technology may be advantageous, it seems weird to write a whole article about it without mentioning the obvious solution: Just Heat The Battery. It's true that many early EVs (and most non-Teslas even today) don't ship with battery thermal management. But they won't be getting new battery chemistry either.
This is one of those Great New Technology items that smells like a failure simply because it's not competing with the thing the designers think it is. It's not enough for this to beat a cold battery with a performance delta ("5x", per the article) that would justify its additional cost. It has to beat a battery with a garden variety heat pump attached, which is a much (much) lower cost barrier.
In winter, I lose 5-10% of my battery a day due to heating my battery. Tesla is nice enough to hide this under "You should keep your car plugged in all the time" messages. It's really a pain, especially if you have a relatively small battery to begin with. I have a 2019 Model 3 w/ a 50 kwh battery, and use 10-20 kwh on a regular basis; 5 kwh wasted means as much as 1/3 of my energy use is effectively waste.
I'd be very interested in seeing what they can provide for us. Improved battery chemistry for use in the far north is of far, far more value than yet another 5 person car for 1 person driving in San Francisco.
When I bought a Model 3 last year I knew full well the issues with charging, temperature capacity loss, battery heating, etc. What I was surprised by was loss of regen! If the battery is below 20F or so then the firmware will only give it a trickle of regen braking. After all, it's effectively very fast charging, which a frozen battery can't handle.
I wonder if regen braking going to zero is behind some of the horror stories of sudden unexpected range loss in cold temps.
> In winter, I lose 5-10% of my battery a day due to heating my battery.
Exactly! That sounds like a drawback when you state it like that, but what it actually means is that this magic battery doodad needs to provide 90-95% of the performance of its existing, mature competitor (assuming no other drawbacks) just to be break-even in the market. You don't disrupt markets with numbers like that.
My 2022 Volkswagen e-Up has zero thermal management of the battery, it's completely passively cooled with no heating. Not that it really matters, people have tested it and charging speed only starts to degrade after 3-4 rapid charges in one day, with "rapid" in quotes(in tops out at 40kW).
I believe the eGolf which was sold in the US shares the same drivetrain and battery.
Almost all non-Tesla EVs offer a heat pump option. Most non-Tesla EVs sold do not have one. Just go to your local VW dealer or whatever and see what the specs are on the ID.4's on the lot is.
Heating, in its various forms, has one big drawback that having a battery that can charge faster in low temps would be really nice in: Starting the day needing to charge.
Ideally, you don't do that, but when traveling sometimes you have to stay at a place that doesn't have a charger, and it's really cold, and now rather than a 30 minute charge it's more like 90 minutes.
You don't even need a heat pump. You can just slightly overvolt the charger, so that some electrical energy is lost as heat rather get than transformed into chemical bonds.
> This is one of those Great New Technology items that smells like a failure simply because it's not competing with the thing the designers think it is.
This technology makes no sense for fast DC charging because there's enough waste heat to keep up the battery temperature, and you can just use some of the power to heat up the battery.
But it can help for slow overnight charging. Keeping battery heated all night is wasteful, but you still want to be able to charge.
That doesn’t work when the problem is the battery is already sub-zero - lithium plating occurs when trying to charge in those conditions, destroying the battery.
You can’t just overvolt out of that - you need an external source of heat until you’re out of the dangerous thermal area.
> You don't even need a heat pump. You can just slightly overvolt the charger
The BMW i3 had inductive heating strips underneath the coolant channels in the battery pack[1]. I know our i3 had a heat pump, I presume both were in play.
We used our i3 down to -25C (-13F) many times, didn't have any issues.
I mean this is an incremental improvement that would be very welcome. Why be so negative? Look around the products that have lived through decades of incremental improvements and compare them. Like the phone in your pocket or computer you are using.
Heat pumps struggle to do much at the temperature range the article proposes.
Edit: downvote me all you want, I was responding specifically to “It has to beat a battery with a garden variety heat pump attached” of which EV heat pumps are not garden variety heat pumps, which do struggle at those temperatures. Didn’t think I had to be so pedantic.
Pretty sure the ones in most EVs today work fine at -10C, but they may lose some efficiency. The thing is, there's already mechanisms in some cars to generate waste heat specifically for this purpose. Tesla's already have the ability to run their motors 'inefficiently' generating waste heat, which can be pumped into the battery coolant and heat that. It's no better than electric strip heating, but it doesn't add any cost to the system.
The real benefit, in my view, to being able to charge at cold temps is to improve overall efficiency. If you have to waste some amount of power to heat the battery then that is power that could have been used to charge the car instead...
The 5x delta is stated to be at 14F. That absolutely is within the reasonable operating range of a Model Y heat pump, not sure what you're citing?
It's true that there are very cold environments (Fairbanks winters, say) where in-car thermal management won't be sufficient to keep charging rates high. But those are the same environments where you can't even start a gasoline car without an engine block heater, and I don't see many "no cars in Alaska" arguments on the internet. Everything has limits, but I don't see this battery trickery having much of a home.
it seems a little bit dubious to me. You can't beat the Arrhenius Law, not in Electrochemistry, anyhow. The ion mobility would be very very low, you'd have to rely that the temperature in the battery itself is above 0°C
Nice to see that they require minimal changes at the battery manufacturer. Too often people come up with good ideas like this without accounting for other factors in the supply chain.
Readit News
The real claim is 10 minute charging of lithium-ion batteries with a process which is a minor mod to existing battery production.
There's no product yet.
Batteries with good low temp behavior have many specialized uses. Things that have a small solar panel, a battery, and no grid connection could benefit from this. Even flashlights could use this.
[1] http://arborbatteries.us/
As a side topic, what are the currently available options for this?
I've heard about sodium ion (safer but still not sub-zero charging friendly, also no easily available solar charging controller boards), lithium titanate (same), and plain old deep-cycle lead acid.
For small solar-powered projects, it would be nice if there was a power bank on market which supported solar charging, and could either be safely charged in freezing temperatures, or had built-in temperature sensor and reject charging when it's too cold.
https://midsummerwholesale.co.uk/buy/eleven-energy/4-5-kwh-s...
https://www.ttnews.com/articles/byd-5-minute-charging-rivals
BYD would not pump 400 kW into a battery at -10 C. This research helps in the situation where you have a cold battery, and need to start charging it before it can warm up.
Not saying it's impossible, but that won't be easy.
Megawatt chargers? We'll need the generation capacity to support 500,000 of them.
Is that going to change?
In the Netherlands they are partnered with a local green electricity provider (Vattenfall) and Shel for their charger network. Shell owns the most petrol stations along the highways, so they will have their chargers there for sure.
I'm expecting the tariffs on Chinese EVs to be rolled back in EU after the US tariffs. They might want BYD to open local factories, like NIO is planning to do.
Europe remains to be seen, but also unlikely short term as we're also slapping lots of tariffs on chinese EVs to protect local industries
If the charge rate is reduced by battery temp and chemistry, shunt the surplus supply into changing the battery temp, no?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyGgrkeds5U
https://electrek.co/2017/08/24/tesla-model-3-exclusive-batte...
I believe the "microscale channels" are a better solution that reduces the amount of heat generated at the connection points of the battery, and also reduces the high temperature gradient at high voltage charging at low internal temps (high internal temperature delta), which I understand to be a primary cause of battery degradation.
This is one of those Great New Technology items that smells like a failure simply because it's not competing with the thing the designers think it is. It's not enough for this to beat a cold battery with a performance delta ("5x", per the article) that would justify its additional cost. It has to beat a battery with a garden variety heat pump attached, which is a much (much) lower cost barrier.
I'd be very interested in seeing what they can provide for us. Improved battery chemistry for use in the far north is of far, far more value than yet another 5 person car for 1 person driving in San Francisco.
I wonder if regen braking going to zero is behind some of the horror stories of sudden unexpected range loss in cold temps.
Exactly! That sounds like a drawback when you state it like that, but what it actually means is that this magic battery doodad needs to provide 90-95% of the performance of its existing, mature competitor (assuming no other drawbacks) just to be break-even in the market. You don't disrupt markets with numbers like that.
That’s false since at latest 2013 in the US.
The past 12 years of BMW as a counterexample all have thermal management. Tesla too.
You may be remembering the original Nissan Leaf?
I believe the eGolf which was sold in the US shares the same drivetrain and battery.
Ideally, you don't do that, but when traveling sometimes you have to stay at a place that doesn't have a charger, and it's really cold, and now rather than a 30 minute charge it's more like 90 minutes.
> This is one of those Great New Technology items that smells like a failure simply because it's not competing with the thing the designers think it is.
This technology makes no sense for fast DC charging because there's enough waste heat to keep up the battery temperature, and you can just use some of the power to heat up the battery.
But it can help for slow overnight charging. Keeping battery heated all night is wasteful, but you still want to be able to charge.
You can’t just overvolt out of that - you need an external source of heat until you’re out of the dangerous thermal area.
The BMW i3 had inductive heating strips underneath the coolant channels in the battery pack[1]. I know our i3 had a heat pump, I presume both were in play.
We used our i3 down to -25C (-13F) many times, didn't have any issues.
[1]: https://youtu.be/JjPIuLz5VFI?t=1124
Some do but don't enable it immediately, but do so with a software upgrade. (such as what happened with Kia EV6/Hyundai Ioniq 5)
Edit: downvote me all you want, I was responding specifically to “It has to beat a battery with a garden variety heat pump attached” of which EV heat pumps are not garden variety heat pumps, which do struggle at those temperatures. Didn’t think I had to be so pedantic.
The real benefit, in my view, to being able to charge at cold temps is to improve overall efficiency. If you have to waste some amount of power to heat the battery then that is power that could have been used to charge the car instead...
It's true that there are very cold environments (Fairbanks winters, say) where in-car thermal management won't be sufficient to keep charging rates high. But those are the same environments where you can't even start a gasoline car without an engine block heater, and I don't see many "no cars in Alaska" arguments on the internet. Everything has limits, but I don't see this battery trickery having much of a home.
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