Ford, University of Michigan Open Next-Generation EV Battery Research Lab

cartechboy writes "Its no secret that one constraint on electric vehicle adoption is battery production capacity and cost. Right now battery costs add thousands of dollars in price tags on electric vehicles, so the race is on to gain capacity make cheaper batteries. Today, Ford and the University of Michigan are announcing an $8 million EV experimental battery research lab to try and accelerate this type of early testing. The lab, which will be on campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will allow automakers, battery makers and individual researchers to test battery cells earlier in the process than ever. The lab says it will have strict controls to protect each entity's individual intellectual property as the research in theory happens all in one place."

Re:Eight million is small spuds

[Lumpy]

It's because the energy density of gasoline in a battery is insanely dangerous. Right now the very high capacity batteries are scary as hell, if they start to approach gasoline in energy density, I'll be demanding built in fire suppression and explosion containment technology built into them.

A gasoline fire is a cake walk compared to a shorted 20MWatt battery.

8 million compared to

[mark_reh]

how much that the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are spending? As always with Detroit, too little, too late.

Fundamental Problem, and Alternatives

[VernonNemitz]

There is a fundamental problem that no ordinary chemical battery will ever be able get "through". Basically, all ordinary chemical batteries involve two things, which we can call "fuel" and "oxidizer". The two things are stored separately; they are allowed to chemically combine, generating electricity in the process, and they are separated back into fuel and oxidizer when the battery is recharged. The mass of a battery is therefore constant, and it is always being carried around by the vehicle, regardless of the charge-level of the battery. Meanwhile, ordinary car engines only carry fuel around; they don't need to carry oxidizer because they get that from the surrounding atmosphere. Furthermore, when the fuel is combined with the oxidizer, the waste products (mostly carbon dioxide and water) are simply dumped; they don't have to be carried around like the "spent" fuel+oxidizer in a battery continues to be carried around. So, logically, alternatives to the entire concept of ordinary chemical batteries need to be sought. The first-level alternative that comes to mind is something known as a "zinc-air" battery. It gets its oxidizer from the air. However, after the chemical reaction occurs, the waste product is still carried around (so the zinc can be recovered when the battery is recharged). It it not as "good", in terms of vehicle mass, as the dumping of wastes that ordinary gas-powered vehicles can do. The second-level alternative is a "fuel cell". It also gets its oxidizer from the air, and its waste products can also be dumped. Fuel cells have an additional advantage over ordinary car engines; the engine extracts the potential energy from fuel at perhaps 45% efficiency, while the fuel cell can extract the potential energy at perhaps 70% efficiency. The problem here is that most fuel-cell research is concentrating on using hydrogen as the fuel, and it has the big problem of being very-low-density stuff. You have to carry a large volume of it around, in order to be carrying around a decent amount of total fuel energy. They need to research fuel cells that "burn" hydrocarbons that can be easily carried as liquids, much denser/less-volumous than gases like hydrogen. Next, moving sideways among the alternatives, is the flywheel energy-storage system. There is something peculiar about the way the research in that field has differed from electric-battery research. They would like to build a flywheel that can store about the same energy as represented by a vehicle's tank of gasoline. Meanwhile, because of the fundamental problem of batteries, they adopted the "hybrid vehicle" concept because they knew they could not get that kind of total energy or travel-range from batteries. Well, why not throw out the batteries in a hybrid, and use a flywheel instead? There are some very immediate advantages to doing that. First is simply that existing flywheel-energy-storage tech can easily match the range of existing batteries in hybrids --and they flywheels weigh less. Second is that the "conversion efficiency" from stored energy into dynamic energy is much better for flywheels (90+%) than it is for batteries (about 70%) --that's a major reason why a smaller flywheel can store as much as a larger battery pack. Third is the "recharge time" --revving up a flywheel, storing energy, can consume a lot of electricity very quickly, much much more quickly than charging a battery pack. Fourth has to do with the way a vehical can accelerate. It happens that to cruise along at freeway speeds, the car needs less than 20 horsepower to do that. But to accelerate quickly, to get up to that speed, that is why a car would have 100+ extra horsepower. Well, both batteries and flywheels can quickly dump lots of energy into electric motors, which means that in a hybird car, the gas engine only needs enough power for long-distance cruising, plus some extra to recharge the batteries or flywheel. But the flywheel is still a bit better than the batteries, because a flywheel can be revved up and down very easily, whil