It’s no secret that batteries are the most expensive part of an electric
vehicle. As such, this is the root of the industry’s problem and a roadblock
to making larger strides into the mainstream market. Researchers around the
world are racing to solve this problem, and now a team of German scientists
say they’ve taken a crucial step in that direction.
The team, from the Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology
IWS, has devised a new production process for EV batteries that features
coating their electrodes with a dry film of chemicals rather than liquids.
According to them, this process is less energy-intensive, which means it’s
cheaper, and it is also better than the standard process in that it does not
involve toxic solvents.
"Our dry transfer coating process aims to noticeably reduce the
process costs in electrode coating," project manager Dr. Benjamin Schumm
told
Phys.org. "Manufacturers can eliminate toxic and expensive solvents and
save energy costs during drying. In addition, our technology also facilitates
the use of electrode materials that are difficult or even impossible to
process wet-chemically."
The latter part of Schumm’s comment is important: in the future, batteries
will be a lot more energy dense than today’s version, and this will require
the use of these materials. The team’s binder polymer-based alternative to
expensive and toxic wet chemistry comes in anticipation of the batteries of
the future, many of which, according to Schumm and his colleagues, will be
solid-state.
"These batteries will be able to store more energy in the same volume
than today's lithium-ion batteries," the IWS project leader said.
Related: A
Mentality Problem? Many Americans Can’t Afford An Extra $400 Expense
Most battery-related breakthroughs in the news are reported from the lab,
and despite assurances that the technology is potentially scalable, few have
been actually tested. This is not the case with the IWS electrode-coating
process. The institute already has a partner from the manufacturing industry:
Finnish BroadBit Batteries. The company has already launched a pilot
production unit at a factory and is producing sodium ion batteries using the
new coating process, which, in addition to all its other advantages, is also
substantially faster than wet chemistry.
Given all this, the dry-coating tech may someday replace the traditional
way of coating electrodes with the chemicals that make them electrodes, and
this replacement will allow EV makers to achieve two of their biggest goals:
lowering the price of their vehicles and boosting the energy density of their
batteries with the use of new chemicals.
European carmakers should be especially happy about the lower battery cost
implications of the IWS team’s invention. These have poured billions into
their EV production plans but are excessively reliant
on imported battery cells. A homegrown cheaper battery production process
could help them to reduce this dependence at a crucial moment when EVs,
helped by government policies, have a chance to really take off.
A recent study
from AlixPartners estimated that “by 2023 a whopping $255 billion in R&D
and capital expenditures (will be) spent globally on electric vehicles, and
that some 207 electric models are set to hit the market by 2022.”
The bad news is that many of these would not be able to compete “due to
currently-high systems costs, low volumes and intense competition.”
The German team’s new production process could help even the playing
field.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
More Top Reads from Safehaven.com:
