Why You Should Be Excited About This Battery Breakthrough From Sweden!

we're living in something of a golden age of the humble battery pack in the last decade alone we have seen countless new advancements that have allowed for the commercialization of an ever increasingly energy dense and ever increasingly power power-dense lithium-ion battery we have seen improvements in battery construction techniques and we've seen improvements in cell chemistries which have allowed packs to be made faster contain less or no cobalt and we've seen battery packs that can charge at ever higher power rates which means for an ev you spend less time charging and as you'll know if you watch this channel a lot we are seeing the start of a brave new world of solid-state battery tech where advancements in cell design are so advanced we could soon see the commercialization of electric vehicles with the ranges in excess of a thousand miles or 1600 kilometers per charge all using a battery pack no physically larger than the battery packs found in today's long range champions like the tesla model s long range plus solid-state technology is now considered something of the next holy grail for electric vehicle battery packs by their very nature they are a lot safer are incredibly puncture resistant and they often require less cooling but that doesn't mean that it's the only brave new direction that battery pack cell chemistries are heading tesla of course with its new 4860 cells hopes to dramatically reduce the cost of making electric car battery packs which will in turn make the cars they're fitted into a lot more affordable and it's also proposed a new load-bearing structural battery pack setup where battery cells aren't fitted into modules which are then placed in bricks inside a large battery pack but are actually formed to build load-bearing structures within the vehicle's chassis using this technique it is possible to dramatically reduce the amount of metal needed to make a car since the battery pack can operate underneath the vehicle as both a traditional battery pack and a load bearing member and it's a design which is catching on in other parts of the auto industry as well at its power day last week volkswagen pretty much announced an identical roadmap to tesla in this regard although it had a different physical battery cell design it's going to use prismatic unified cell modules versus tesla's preferred cylindrical cell but the principle is the same but in sweden at chalmers university a team of researchers have begun taking the term structural battery pack to a whole different level instead of using the battery pack as a structural load-bearing component within the vehicle's chassis these researchers have successfully developed a new construction technique in which the very vehicle itself becomes the battery pack while the construction technique doesn't give quite the same energy density as the best conventional lithium ion or solid-state designs out there the team behind this so-called massless energy storage are confident that their latest breakthrough could really have some significant impact on everything from electric cars and autonomous drones through to electric aircraft bicycles and even satellites so let's take a look at this new breakthrough and i'm going to explain why it is just so significant first just a little acknowledgement the concept of building mechanical structures that also happen to operate as a battery isn't actually new in fact the first attempt to build a functioning structural battery like this can be traced back to 2007. that's 14 years ago but according to the researchers at chalmers university of technology and their colleagues over at the kth royal institute of technology in stockholm they've now been able to produce a structural battery that not only works in practice but has the energy density of 24 watt hours per kilogram and a stiffness of 25 gigapascals i'll come to energy density in a second but i think we should probably look at that stiffness measurement what's being referred to here is the elastic modulus or modulus of elasticity it's a measurement that refers to how easily or not an object undergoes elastic deformation in case you're unsure elastic deformation literally means how something deforms non-permanently think of an elastic band stretching and then going back to its original size this is the opposite of plastic deformation which occurs when an object is bent or stretched past the point where it reflexively bends back to its original position when the force is relaxed officially the elastic modulus of an object is defined as the slope of its stress strain curve in the elastic deformation region but don't worry i'm not going to go into mathematical formulas associated with it come to think of it nor do you really need to know that the modulus of elasticity is commonly known as young's modulus abbreviated to e in many equations but what you do need to know is that the higher the measurement of stiffness the less likely something is to undergo elastic deformation stiffness is usually measured in units of pressure so in this case we're going to use pascals the s i unit of measurement for pressure steel's stiffness depends on its exact chemical composition but a good average ballpark figure for the stiffness of seal sits somewhere around the 200 gigapascal mark while the stiffness of aluminium is about 69 gigapascals this means that the current structural battery that's been developed by chalmers university which gets its strength from its carbon fiber anode and lithium-ion phosphate coated aluminium foil cathode separated by a fiberglass fabric in an electrolyte matrix is not quite as strong as aluminium but it can certainly compete against other commonly used lightweight construction materials that you might find in airplanes and racing cars with the structural stiffness out of the way let's look at the measurement you might be more familiar with the energy density or how much physical energy can be stored per unit mass tesla's new 4860 cells are capable of storing around 380 watt hours of energy per kilogram of battery material these cells are some of the most energy-dense commercially produced battery cells out there and frankly this is one of the reasons why tesla's new battery packs and its planned weight-bearing battery pack construction will ultimately save weight improve range cut materials and cost for you if tesla's more conventional battery cell chemistries can manage 380 watt hours of energy storage per kilogram though why should i be getting excited about these new structural battery designs from sweden simply put even with an energy density of 24 watt hours per kilogram which is about six percent of the energy density of tesla's latest cells and around one-fifth of the energy capacity of more conventional lithium-ion batteries on the market today this fully embedded body as a battery design completely eliminates the need for a separate discrete battery pack and given the battery packs in electric cars electric airplanes and drones are often the heaviest thing in them that's big news you need an external structure for all of these forms of transport for both safety and structural integrity but if you can get those external structures operating as a battery as well you can save a significant amount of weight and improve efficiency dramatically right now the researchers say that they envisage their newest structural battery with performance 10 times better in terms of strength and energy storage capabilities than anything it previously developed could be used in lightweight electric bicycles and small consumer gadgets where more traditional battery packs have often resulted in a heavy and bulky design i should note too that these researchers comment in their official press release announcing this latest breakthrough that they didn't actually set out to try and break new records or to achieve a super high energy density instead they were more interested in investigating the effects of material architecture and the thickness of the separator between anode and cathode on the actual battery's energy storage capabilities the work done thus far is so promising that the research team has been financed by the swedish national space agency to carry out further research and development of this cell design next on the list is a plan to replace the aluminium foil of the current cell's cathode with a carbon fiber cathode this will dramatically improve the material stiffness and when added with a new ultra-thin fibreglass separator could improve the fast charge capabilities of the cell to boot according to the project lead the team believes that these new modifications will make it possible to increase energy density to 75 watt hours per kilogram while increasing stiffness to 75 gigapascals or in other words increase the energy density to 68 of the energy density of the 110 watt hours per kilogram of the original 2011 nissan leaf all while increasing the stiffness to be on par with aluminium if you take away the need for a conventional battery pack that is extremely exciting indeed especially for the electric airplane world where every kilogram really matters even if these researchers can't get the energy density up much beyond 100 watt hours per kilogram and i think they will there is still a definite hope for the future of an electric airplane using this material as both a fuselage structure and combined battery pack however before we get super excited and expect to see carbon fiber body panels that are also battery packs remember that we're talking about a laboratory research project and you should also remember that it can sometimes take years even decades to bring something from the lab into the commercial vehicle world and then most projects fail to reach commercialization because it is super hard to take a successful proof of concept from a lab and scale it up to full-on reproducible affordable commercial series production so for now i expect we'll see this battery technology find itself in high-end gadgets laptops tablets and mobile phones i also expect it to be used in satellites and spacecraft where every kilogram of weight reduced can translate to increased payload for the rocket used to get it to space or if you prefer reduced fuel requirements for the same launch so nikki i hear you say why are you telling me about this fancy schmancy new battery chemistry that won't be making it into an eevee i can buy anytime soon the answer is simple this technology if it can be commercialized will have some pretty amazing knock-on effects lighter vehicles reduced use of steel and aluminium and a theoretical world where your vehicle is the battery and you can bet that if this gets picked up by the aerospace industry its future could be very bright indeed just think of the number of things that we use on an everyday basis that came from the space race from nasa or other space agencies yeah i am excited but i can wait until it's ready assuming of course it can navigate the incredibly difficult and usually failed journey from lab to production line what do you think that's it for today as always thanks to the folks on my right for being off 15 to 49 a month patreon supporters special thanks to our 50 dollar a month patrons that's raging fellows gordon c paul conway laura sanborn anthony coats sean ueda and tesla in the gong and our deepest gratitude to our 100 a month patreon supporters they are john lyons marshall ward reggie watts jp fagerback will graylin and ian you can of course become a patreon supporter yourself by following one of the links below you'll also find a link to send us a tip through kofi or bitcoin if you prefer to support us in that way and there's a link to our discord chat server which is completely free to join so if you're the chatty type why not give it a go and as usual you'll find everything from t-shirts to face masks and water bottles and hoodies my favorite at our 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Channel: Transport Evolved

Views: 167,337

Rating: 4.8622961 out of 5

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Id: qeFxqg3B4RA

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021