Many people are still reluctant to buy electric cars that can
travel three times that distance on a single charge. This so-called range
anxiety is one reason gasoline-powered vehicles still rule the road, but a team
of scientists is working to ease those fears.
Mareike
Wolter, Project Manager of Mobile Energy Storage Systems at
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Dresden, Germany, is working with a team on a new
battery that would give electric car a range of about 620 miles (1,000 km) on a
single charge.
Tesla’s latest vehicle, the Model S 100D has a 100-kilowatt-hour battery pack, which reportedly gives it a range of 335 miles (540 km). The pack is large, about 16 feet long, 6 feet wide and 4 inches thick. It contains more than 8,000 lithium-ion battery cells, each one individually packaged inside a cylinder housing that measures about 2 to 3 inches (6 to 7 centimeters) high and about 0.8 inches (2 cm) across.
Nearly 50
percent of each cell is devoted to components such as the housing, the anode
(the battery's negative terminal), the cathode (the battery's positive
terminal) and the electrolyte, the liquid that transports the charged
particles. Additional space is needed inside the car to wire the battery packs
to the vehicle's electrical system.
The scientists decided to reimagine the entire design, they
said.
To do so,
they got rid of the housings that encase individual batteries and turned to a
thin, sheet-like design instead of a cylinder. Their metallic sheet is coated
with an energy-storage material made from powdered ceramic mixed with a polymer
binder. One side serves as the cathode, and other side serves as the anode.
The researchers stacked several of these so-called bipolar
electrodes one on top of the other, like sheets of paper in a ream, separating
the electrodes by thin layers of electrolyte and a material that prevents
electrical charges from shorting out the whole system.
The "ream" is sealed within a package measuring about
10 square feet (1square meter), and contacts on the top and bottom connect to
the car's electrical system.
She added that the researchers aim to have such a system ready
to test in cars by 2020.
Post a Comment