Megawatt Charging Made Possible? Nxu Factory Tour

foreign girls hi again uh it's Corey and I and we're at uh new and uh Corey already made mention of the snappy uh Snappy little logo that they've got and that's you X U the x is kind of hidden in there yeah and by the way if you turn it upside down it still spells the same thing yeah that's uh kind of I like that kind of stuff but we're here yeah we're here to check out their Battery Technology they have energy storage and charging technology that they're going to show us really interested to what what they're going to show us we're going to have Victor atlasman director of engineering show us around I think he's right inside yeah and uh we're here in hot sunny Arizona I forgot my sunglasses 91 degrees show them your new sunglasses there you go yeah there we go Corey has now invented a new sunglasses I brought mine which is uh very unusual because as we all know um I'll forget everything so um let's see if we can uh go and go and meet uh go and meet the main man come on in thank you so a lot of people ask what do we do here at you and so the thing is we do nearly everything related to the ecosystem in not just the e-mobility space but anything that touches the battery space we're a vertically integrated technology company and why that's really important is just because you make a battery doesn't mean it's just going to work you have to combine it with other things like for example uh in our company we have a Power Electronics team that works on BMS we have an active balancing BMS system that we've developed we have our own HVAC system because you need to condition the battery pack in order for it to allow 5c rate of charge and discharge we're able to hit up to actually 6C rate which means you can push a lot of current into our batteries we have a mechanical team here who designs our battery packs and a lot of the fixtures that you see here we have the charging team which is responsible for taking all the technology and putting it together we have a whole cloud and an embedded Software System uh team that's dedicated for building the ecosystem that makes everything work um so the whole Focus that we have here in the company is allowing a uh a setup for the consumers that allow them a no compromise solution to the transition to your electricity and not just an e-mobility space you talk about energy storage whether it's in a residential space or a utility space for a building like this or utilities for grid resiliency even uh grid Independence is something that I talk about which means that you get to own the electricity the same way that cell phone data went away you don't pay per text message anymore you don't pay per a megabyte that you use you don't pay per minute it's now unlimited everything and so electricity is going to go to that type of service or energy as a service that allows you access to electricity because it's going to be abundant uh the issue that we have right now is the capture of it so we're unlocking that ability by generating or creating uh batteries and so what you see over here is our formation process we started at the tail end of the battery production side which is the process of qualification grading formation and as you look around you can see that one of our core values is make it happen and because we don't follow the traditional Norm when it comes to batteries and there's different kind of batteries cylindrical Prismatic and pouch we do two form factors here one is pouch and we do a variant of Prismatic we follow the cube cell and so let's uh walk around right now I'm looking at the amount of power you got coming in here how much power do you have coming in this particular building has a little bit over one MVA and it's definitely not enough so we're working on supplementing that energy so we can grow our capacity we're also looking into expanding this facilities 44 000 square foot facility and we need at least four times that amount of space in order to continue production and at least five times the amount of power we have over two gigawatt hours of demand for our battery cells wow that's nothing compared to what's coming yeah so let's walk around it's a little bit of a maze over here and so as you can see over here this is where we're doing some of our testing for our equipment everything you see was made ourselves here so let's start with the the environmental chamber if you take a peek inside [Music] you could feel the heat that's emanating yeah and this is where we go through the process of formation basically baking the cells it wants a particular type of uh heat to humidity level in order for it to be consistent results every time you produce uh battery cells so there's virtually nothing connected right now uh do you have a do you have a situation then when you uh you have this loaded up yeah I see two cells there yeah so I believe all the cells are going through grading right now and if you didn't know it doesn't matter what your name is on the company to go through the process of approximately 50 amp hour cell it takes eight days to 12 Days yeah bye see anyone knows I'm just gonna close the door so uh yeah what makes us unique is that you know rather than waiting especially today when things are 36 month lead times uh sometimes 50 plus monthly times very very challenging we kind of have a make it happen core value here where you know we get stuff very quickly we build stuff we'll facilitate it we come up with ways to solve the underlying sort of Technology problem or root problem versus you know waiting a long period of time or not being able to actually facilitate it so we'll build it if we have to the containers are one step in that process yeah um some of the fixtures all those other things we have newer machines testers and things like that that do a lot of the formation stuff or as Victor will show you we figure out ways to sort of put things together to actually make an underlying system very cool yeah I uh I prefer uh I prefer companies that um just don't go out and buy you know glamor Palace kind of equipment I like this kind of a thing because um my whole life I've been look if you lived on a farm uh you find ways of getting the job done without spending a lot of money and uh I'm I'm kind of into that and this seems like like I say up until the city made us get rid of them um this was a fabulous way for as far as I was concerned for storage and for actually in your case making environmental control uh offices or a building into buildings or building in a building and allows us to move very quickly and then we can test technology and then we can continue to advance that and grow that we're always looking at ways that we can drive the cost down immediately versus um you know focusing on okay let's get something out there and then 10 years or five years from now is how long it actually takes us to drive that cost down we're looking at how do we first get a solution built in a prototype built and understand the process which making batteries is not easy it's not something you could simply just Google and then we always try to focus on okay how do we drive that cost down for growth capabilities right technology whatever it is and how do we do that very very quickly people did that process one of the issues that exists is the technology doesn't exist for what we want to build and so we're forced to make it like for example we're dealing in Scales of megawatt um at five to six C rate batteries and there isn't testing equipment there isn't charging equipment there isn't cable equipment just in general across the board there isn't contactors or fuse is rated for that amount of power so we are forced in a good way because it allows us to kind of control that that space uh for building that high amount of energy so we've designed contactors to support over a thousand amps we've designed fuses that supports 3000 amps that unlocks Mega while charging we've designed battery test equipment since we used we designed our own battery management board we're able to use that in the process of formation uh and validation not just for battery packs but it can be used externally as well we designed our own HVAC because simply there she is great at Home Depot uh I mean they're getting a free ad right here yeah yeah exactly who needs uh who needs a stainless steel bucket if I can get a free home soon Depot bucket I love the heat exchangers over there too yeah yeah okay so there just simply isn't anything on the market that supports this amount of cooling or heating power so we have to develop it ourselves so I just want to jump over to that for example there isn't pdus for example that support a thousand amps right so I was talking about the the contactor that allows us to to be able to achieve that so you can see over here we're currently undergoing testing between our pack and our pdu to allow it to transfer a large amount of current do you do any cooling of the cables or is there any technology behind that so okay let's uh let's check out the charger let's walk over there we're gonna okay around over on the corner let's sneak by this way over here we'll come by and so when we originally demonstrated our megawatt charger we pushed over 1.2 megawatts through a single cable and handle and Inlet that we designed here ourselves there's no company out there that has anything like this so this particular handle delivered over 1.2 megawatts of power go ahead and hold it it's a little bit of heft because it's an immersion pool table uh but we believe we can push over three megawatts through this cable and that's important because as bad as long as the battery can suck it yeah that's the uh and that's what we develop here is a battery that can take it this is a CCS cable um and I'm pretty confident uh you all have charged on a electric charging station let's say like a 350 kilowatt station uses a huger shooter cable they have some hefts to it I want you to take this handle out feel the weight of it feel the flexibility of it and tell me how many kilowatts do you think this cable is a thousand so it's rated for 700 kilowatt continuous and you can Peak a megawatt through this cable for a short period of time kind of what I was alluding to earlier is Vehicles today uh Peak at a when they're at a low state of charge at the highest kilowatt right and then they start to diminish in terms of performance well what's important about our new battery is the fact that it doesn't diminish so whether you charge at 10 or 60 percent or 90 you're going to get the same rate of charge and it's important because as you maintain like create condition and the battery gets it ready but as you start charging it heats up and has the diminished amount of power that it pushes in especially when you talk about the charge curve uh but when it comes to our battery our battery has a straight line when it comes to Performance and it has to do with thermal uh cooling thermal conditioning battery or thermal management management and so as long as you keep the battery at a certain temperature which is why we have such a beefy HVAC you're able to push that megawatt of current continuously throughout the battery so what are the key enablers today that is it uh materials you use is how the batteries are assembled is it a tablet design so it is a tablet's design and it's the mechanical structure of the battery itself so we have a few patterns around the actual Cube shape of it and it's volumetrically efficient so you can pack a lot of energy and you have a lot of surface area so it's easy to Wick away heat very quickly and the internal structure of the cell being a z-stack design and the tablets design keeps the DC IR low that's the DC internal resistance very low so it doesn't generate a lot of heat while it's pushing current through as well as able to Wick away heat that does get generated while you're pushing that amount of currents this is a CCS Inlet here yeah and this is our megawatt Inlet here we passed the megawatt through this Inlet right here we designed ourselves and so you mentioned about Pokey Oak and so the pins are aligned in a way that prevents it from any other orientation um and so the same size four times the amount of power excellent and so in terms of the height itself we just put the container on Wheels to make it easier to move around so that's why it's a little bit elevated but the ideal location for all inlets are typically hip height yeah right um so that's okay so I have a question here um so you got four times the power how do I get four times the speed yes and so it's related it's about the current so our voltage on our battery packs is designed to step up to 1500 volts which keeps the current down increases the power so you push a lot more energy into the battery cell as well as keep the current very high through that transition same thing here so on the CCS side most vehicles are on the 400 volt architecture you're starting to see a lot of 800 volt architecture and it's interesting because a lot of the technology that was built for CCS was built around the 400 volt architecture so as vehicles are stronger and come out at the 800 volts architecture you're starting to see problems when they uh hook up to older charging stations CCS was originally like the first version at 400 volts uh the V3 superchargers for Tesla those are 400 volt architecture and so when they're opening up their Network to outside for CCS the vehicles are 800 are going to have diminished uh a power or performance because they have to step down to a 400 and a dcds converter in the vehicle's episode I'm up to 800. um so our charger is capable of 1500 volts yeah that's a big number absolutely and so uh in terms of our prototyping capabilities uh as part of our uh mentality for being very vertically integrated we do a lot of Machining ourselves here so this is a five axis uh Mill over here and we also have a mill lathe on the other side that's over there but I want to walk you through that door there um okay we have our own chemistry team here and we're very heavily focused on the future Technologies our current cells are nmc-811 based and that allows you a lot of energy into a small amount of space it's one of the highest energy dense batteries that exist but we also have road maps for like lfp we're also doing silicon anode research and a lot of other Technologies so you're going to take a peek inside I'm curious your your opinion of uh what you think so Lane is going to talk a little bit of how about how we make uh coin cells in single layer pouches that we after we do our slurry mixing and encoding so also talk about the story missing code or actually yeah let's talk about all of it so we start we have a bunch of different raw materials when we get either different types of materials or just different like models from different companies that we want to validate we will nothing's in place right now because we haven't been mixing today uh we start with a mix where we add everything go through the right procedure to get it into the correct slurry and then we can coat small scale electrodes on the doctor blade and then once those are dried we're able to take those small ones and either punch out the coins for coin cells so we can do really small ones either versus another electrode or just versus lithium so that we can get a baseline of the material specs and then we can go into bigger ones which normally we start with slps that are like four by five centimeters just big enough that we can get them out of our Coatings yeah and then run those through to a couple different tests so that we can get more of the full cell interactions and it'll be more scalable to like the full-size cells so excellent uh talk about what's inside a battery the electrodes there's two different materials yeah so we start with our anode and cathode separated by just a plastic separator the anode is normally the graphite and then the cathode is our we use the nickel Rich nmc right now looking at like NCA lfp different ones Yeah so basically those get sandwiched in there closed up in whatever form factor you want whether in here it'll be a coin or an SLP and then those can go straight into testing once they're filled with the electrolyte golden rows like this whether copper aluminum for an old and cat food yeah this one's the aluminum for the cathode with a copper coating for conductivity yeah and then on the other side you can see yeah the copper material yeah yeah so um the big thing that um people all you know clamoring and jumping up and down about um about lithium and whatnot but um graphite's kind of a an issue as well so is that turning into a problem as far as cost or availability for you guys part of the vertical manufacturing's ability to get as much as you can yourself from the raw ingredients and process it or work with Partners like for example there's very few lithium manufacturers in the states there's a lot of Regulation when it comes to it so unfortunately a lot of material like for example Cobalt itself only comes from a few places on the on the planet and so it's about finding as much domestic resources as you can it's less on the costs and it's more about uh what's available because the market fluctuates according to the accordingly to the demand and batteries are in high demand right now so of course the costs are inflated so you want to own as much of the technology and not Outsource it as possible like for example over here we have the different uh lithium salts that we're experimenting with in order to do our own lithium technology yeah well you heard I guess that um they broke ground in Mexico for uh for a lithium processing we have a tremendous amount of lithium in uh in North America it's tons you can't believe um we can't believe how much there is and we also have graphite mines in fact in Canada in Ontario there's a whole town called Cobalt they shut it down because um you know they shut the mine down because nobody needed it or wanted it but but now they're reopening it yeah and then in Quebec they've got a um they got a mine I don't know what happened a forest fire or something but anyways they've got graphite uh or charcoal basically that you make the into graphite uh sitting there uh doing nothing so we've got everything we need it's just a matter of giving somebody a poke in the right direction to get them moving there's a lot of Regulation associated with the production of all the difference even here in Arizona there's a lithium uh mining that's opening up but it's got a short life and only a couple years but it's got enough material to support at least domestic operations well if you look at borders between Canada and the United States there's a great big giant desert and it's loaded with uh with lithium and other rare earth materials so out that way okay yield battery shop very good so this was this is version two of the dry room we did a really small scale version one in the dry room that leaked like I said and we're like okay we Lessons Learned because we iterate fast we build and learn uh and then we built this V2 dry room that's always kept under two percent humidity at all times all times uh and so that's important when it comes to battery manufacturing it's like baking a cake you want you want consistent results you know elevations right your humidity fixed and so let's come in uh let's take a look oh that's our 30 kilowatt hour battery pack right here it's actually 37 kilowatt hour 30 usable that's right here I'm just gonna push this aside because I want you to take a look through the window here and so this is the whole process for battery manufacturing you got titration over here uh over there we have the electrodes that are coded onto the um aluminum or copper uh foil substrate yeah and then there after it goes through stamping so it gets stamped and cut into the shape of the cell whether it's the cube cell or the pouch cell that we're manufacturing then thereafter it goes through the z-stacker machine or gets stacked up in layers after that it gets compressed and baked so the separator fuses with the electrodes uh once it's baked and I'm trying to see if there's any line around uh we can see through the windows uh are you looking for that's the finish so after it's it's fused and baked uh we do both uh we have a process for Ultrasonic welding for the tabs as well as uh we have a green laser welding uh for some of our Battery Technology then it gets put into the pouch material or into the uh Prismatic hand that it goes into and so you can see after it's gone through that process oh yeah so that gentleman on the back on the left is holding them after they've been fused in preparation for Ultrasonic welding and then it gets sealed into the pouch and then it gets filled with electrolytes and it gets uh sealed and then it goes through the formation process okay so you can actually see one of them you guys got it in his hand right there yes so um that's your tablets uh that is tablets yeah we call it the infinite uh infinity tab because you can see the tab runs the entire Lane right of the electrode and that keeps your resistance extremely low that uh air compressor is used for the dryer and some of the most annoying problems so uh you're going to notice in terms of Simple Solutions there's no screen on this in fact this button is going away that's only for for Prototype testing so we can start and stop and kind of control different conditions but I want you to take the plug and just plug it in the car and see what happens and if you don't like this car we change it out we got an e-tron no that's fine we have a monster likes a z-tron my wife's e-tron oh his wife's Citron that's right do you do you take it all the time uh yes yeah it's about who drives the part of this is the one who takes it oh all right uh oh the key is on top so if you want to turn it on I don't actually use this I just know I don't think I've ever used this thing oh there you go Sandy it's charging yeah yeah so we're at um 48 and they've got it uh set for a limit on 75 76 percent so um it's charging that's for sure so all you did is just plug in and it started charging in another 30 seconds and so the important thing here is the user experience you don't need to fiddle around with uh screens or your phone and the whole purpose of this charger is it delivers the maximum rate of charge that the vehicle asks for so even though we designed a 700 uh kilowatt charger during our charge date the highest vehicle that showed up was a 300 kilowatt uh it was the Lucid air Kyle O'Connor came here and the issue was that his vehicle the battery pack needed to be pre-conditioned he's rolled from La he did a Cannonball Run and that battery was basically I don't want to use the word on fire but it was uh like screaming to keep cool and so in the video we did with him you can hear the AC compressor running uh trying to keep the battery pack cool but we pushed over 200 220 kilowatts into that vehicle no limitation of the the charger and so also in addition to uh charging the vehicle we also present the user with a graph of what their charge rate is and and so at any time you can pull up your cell phone and see how much power is being delivered as well as historical data for your vehicle and on my side being on the charging side it was very interesting we had so many different Vehicles four Teslas came by uh we had a two rivians we had a Mini Cooper we had two Chevy bolts three machines one e-tron and each vehicle has its own signature or fingerprint when it comes to charging and so I could tell what the vehicle was just by looking at the chart so it's interesting because you could design a charging system around uh uh or at least educate the user around their vehicle and so just because like an EPA rating a vehicle says it's capable of taking 200 300 kilowatts charging you need the right conditions battery state of charge precondition of the battery pack and whatnot we're unlocking that at you like I mentioned earlier it doesn't matter what percentage of a state of charge your battery pack is you're gonna get consistent results across the board and it's also to educate the public like for example I personally like to charge a hundred percent uh the battery pack some people like to charge at 80. but in some instances if you're fast charging your Peak Performance stops at 60 70 percent and you can head on to your next Charger to continue charging because after 60 70 percent you start to taper off your charge rate and you get into Minister returns sitting there at the charger you're half speed charging so you might as well take the car to the next charging station because you can get the best band for the buck um yeah so right now it's running at about uh 200 um 207 miles per hour um so that's going to give us about 24 minutes and so it's still charging yeah where are we at uh but oops we can stop it hang on let no let's uh let's see where we got to well let me uh plug it back in then I just uh replugged it back in I just unplugged it plugged it okay so we went from um basically 50 to 70 and uh top end as far as uh the owner of this car is 76 so um there it goes yeah and again it's charging it's charging actually higher now what it's uh charge again is 226 miles per hour so that's uh that's pretty oh wait a minute sorry that's down here where are we we're at 217 sorry I was reading the wrong thing so um so you got 226 miles which is about where my wife would unplug it and uh unless we're going on a trip or something I'm curious your thoughts uh with your experience uh do you stop at 80 or you stop at 100 uh it depends if I'm going on a trip I'll get it up to 100 if I'm not I'm uh 75 to 80 percent I don't I don't like to do it higher than that there's no point I didn't even do that with a uh ice vehicle what about at home at home yeah same sort of a deal I uh I just plug it in when it gets to 80 it shuts itself off let's go ahead and and take it and plug it in you oh back in the station yeah I mean you do it Sandy yeah that's it and then what happens is after you're done charging I'm going to open up my uh phone and pull up some pictures and so uh you can see this particular vehicle uh was at 65 percent of the charge uh we delivered 4.1 kilowatt hours delivered in uh three minutes that particular battery pack was a 373 it peaked at 400 428 bolts so that's the the battery packs capacity um and then the amperage at which it's pushing 225 amps at that specific time it peaked at 265 amps uh and uh 83 yeah 83.9 kilowatts is what it's currently delivering that vehicle peaked at a 113.4 kilowatts and so I'm gonna go through some more photos I want to show you a couple more things I'm gonna show you the charge curve so let's look at the rivian I'm going to open it up first then I'll point it and so the rivian when we started that's the state of charge the Arabian started at 30 and ended at 70 so that's your state of charge curve and in terms of power delivery it was a 200 kilowatts consistently there were out the charge until it hit that line right there until it hit 45 and then 45 it started to lower itself and then at 55 it took a a cliff down and you can see it's steady and then Cliffs down steady Clips down but you figure you would see a curve so this is the rivian I mean I'm going to pull up another vehicle I was impressed with this as well as surprised and so this is the lucid so the Lucid we started at zero percent state of charge and we ended at near 100 and so you could see uh at that time uh it spiked a little bit above 200 kilowatts of charge and then it when it it went down and then at 20 mark it spiked back up and so why would it do that and so in Kyle's video he experienced something called the Signet surge where he had a problem charging the vehicle under 20 on on Electra America locations and so we're able to see kind of what was going on behind the scenes uh from the vehicle side but it's an interesting result and kind of like I was mentioning earlier each vehicle has its own fingerprint uh and then you can see it slowly started to gradually go down now I'm going to pull up another vehicle here's a Tesla Tesla uh we started a little bit under 80 finish near 100 percent and you can see it spiked 200 kilowatts and then quickly curve down and then a steady line across that as SOC started going higher started to go lower and lower so that was an interesting uh a majority of Teslas had that spike in initially in the beginning they always have that Spike when you plug in it always just Peaks and then comes back down and then the Chevy bolts we went from 70 to 90 percent uh and it had a small Spike and it only charge about 50 kilowatts uh when you're above like 30 40 state of charge just almost a flat line all the way across hmm so it's interesting because every vehicle has has a different signature in charges differently so we're able to see that and present that information to the user to say let's say you're charging at 150 kilowatts and then 80 it drops down to 50 kilowatts why continue targeting it's a waste of time yeah and so we can present that it's like going to the doctor's office well we when we were Health reporting when we were going across country uh Corey and I we watched the uh we watched that power curve and then they took it out they took that curve out Corey was pissed I mean we could tell basically that um if we if we got around 80 percent sticking around for another hour for the last 20 percent was stupid another 30 or 30 minutes so they were basically hiding that information from you and that's yeah that's no that's no good that's definitely not good all right and so it it's important that when you're using a product that you understand and you're aware of how the product works and so we're here for that transparency like I was mentioning going to a doctor's office you get a health report after when you use the charging station you can get a report and tells you you've achieved the full performance right or you might your battery might be too hot and stuff like that on the other side we can optimize the charger uh based on the information it also tells us for example if a location gets high utilization we know we need to deploy more stations and it's very easy to modular uh increase charging stations where for other companies they have to drop a new Transformer and Transformers are at least one to two year lead time right now so the infrastructure is going to take two years for it to advance in terms of the infrastructure the vehicles are selling like crazy so this unlocks that potential you take this you drop it where you need it you need more you just add more some companies are ahead of the curve by setting up charging stations even though they don't need that demand because this is a little dollar item um it's your experience is where the Money Matters right uh so what would uh what would that box be worth if the if you're at production rate how much would you sell that for the market rate for a charger of about 700 kilowatts is about four to five hundred thousand that's the market rates what it cost us much less yeah because we manufacture a majority of it yeah but we also experiment so there's a partner manufacturer for the cable uh because we can't make everything as much as we want to maybe one day we will uh and so this cable is a prototype cable right now so no one no one in the world is using has plugged in this cable on a charging station to a vehicle no one so we're proud to be the first of many from Mega wall charging demonstrating we can push that much current through a single cable uh to being the first to demonstrate a system that's capable of 700 kilowatts plus it can boost eight to nine hundred kilowatts and no one's doing that okay everybody I'd like to thank Mark and Victor and Corey um and of course Grace for holding that camera all this time uh thank you for a wonderful tour this was absolutely brilliant coming by I love seeing American Ingenuity uh still still moving in a right direction so uh stay tuned to more uh at Monroe live and hopefully we'll uh we'll see these guys move ahead and their stocks at 50 cents you could buy some of those with your kids piggy bank so anyways thanks so much for watching [Music] thank you

Channel: Munro Live

Views: 69,705

Keywords: EV, BEV, Sandy Munro, Munro, Electric Vehicle, Benchmarking, Electric, Insight, Lean Design, Design, MunroLive, MunroLive.com, ElectricCars, Review, Car Review, 2021, Automotive, Automotive Review, Teardown Titan, 2022, Reaction Video, Tesla, video review, Elon Musk, Munro Live, Ask Munro, Teardown, Battery, Batteries, Battery Testing, Charging, Nxu, Energy

Id: neyQ98bCi9M

Length: 33min 53sec (2033 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2023