New Liquid 'Refill' could change how fast batteries charge in EV's

By Yang-Yi Goh,
TechNews
Daily Contributor 08 June 2011 10:46 PM ET

A new breed of quick-charge “liquid” batteries could help make recharging electric cars as easy as filling up at the gas pump.

Electric cars may be driving the auto industry toward a greener future, but a great number of issues still need to be resolved for them to catch up with their petroleum-guzzling forebears with regard to performance and desirability.

Perhaps the biggest problem facing electric auto designers lies in the battery: large and inefficient, today’s standard rechargeable lithium-ion batteries take hours to replenish and are suitable only for short distances. Chevy’s Volt model, for instance, takes nearly 10 hours to fully charge using an ordinary 120 volt outlet, and is able to travel only 25-50 miles before resorting to its backup gas engine.

Thanks to a group of MIT researchers, however, a new generation of leaner, more powerful, and easy-to-refuel batteries may be just around the corner. In a paper published in the May 20 edition of the journal Advanced Energy Materials, the group — led by MIT professors of material science Yet-Ming Chiang and W. Craig Carter — describe a novel approach to battery architecture that revolves around what they call a “semi-solid flow cell.”

[Read also “History Repeats Itself: Carmakers Again Put Electric Vehicles in Fast Lane”]

Essentially, the new design houses the battery’s active components — the positive and negative electrodes, or cathodes and anodes — as solid particles suspended in a liquid electrolyte. This thick, quicksand-like liquid is pumped through the system during the process of charging or discharging the battery.

According to MIT, the architecture should make it possible to reduce the size and cost of a complete battery system to about “half the current levels,” while providing a “10-fold improvement in energy density over present liquid flow batteries.”

“For two decades, advances in batteries have relied on development of improved components to be used in the same basic, inefficient architecture,” Chiang told TechNewsDaily. “Our work represents the inception of ‘Batteries 2.0.’”

The batteries will hopefully bring the performance levels of electric vehicles up to par with their gas engine counterparts. Using the semi-solid flow architecture, Chiang estimates a car will be able to travel 200-300 miles on a single charge.

“Our objective is to replace ‘range anxiety’ with ‘range euphoria,’” he says. Additionally, the new design will make refueling a snap.

Drivers will have the option of either simply pumping out the liquid slurry and replacing it with a fresh batch, swapping out the tanks like you would a spare tire, or recharging the existing material when time permits.

The technology is still at an early stage of development—Chiang expects the first commercial prototypes to be ready in about two years, but foresees the semi-solid flow system challenging the current cell-module-pack approach by the end of the decade.

Source;

http://www.technewsdaily.com/future-cars-2794/

60 Minutes: The Race for the Electric Car

Here's a nice read with a lot of good information on the electric car race.
(CBS) The price of oil is up, gas guzzling cars are out, and a race for a fuel-free, practical electric car is on.

It includes the usual suspects: Detroit, Japan, and Germany. But as correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, a surprising newcomer with no experience at building cars has entered the race: Silicon Valley.

The jury is still out on whether electric cars can ever be really practical, but the computer geeks in California are betting that their inventiveness can beat out Detroit's cumbersome bureaucracy in producing a viable e-car.

One of the reasons electric cars have never taken off has been battery technology. A few years ago, someone wondered: why not use the batteries they put in laptop computers called lithium-ion batteries? That's when the environmentally-conscious hi-tech industry in California jumped in.

The first all-electric sports car is called the "Roadster" and is made by Tesla Motors, a small start-up in Northern California.

The chairman of Tesla, Elon Musk, says the Roadster can accelerate from zero to 60 in four seconds. It is propelled by over 6,000 finger-sized lap top batteries, and not a single drop of oil.

Musk made his fortune by inventing PayPal, the online banking service. He launched Tesla five years ago, with no experience at all in the car business. Now he has over 1,000 orders for the Roadster from people like George Clooney and Gov. Schwarzenegger. They can afford it.

Musk says the Roadster sells for $109,000, and tells Stahl, with a smile, that the car is "a deal." "And our car's twice the efficiency of a Prius. So a Prius is a gas-guzzling hog by comparison with our cars," he says.

Musk says the Roadster can go over 200 miles before you have to plug it in to any ordinary wall outlet. It can take anywhere from four to 30 hours for a full charge.

"It’s very easy. It’s like plugging in a hairdryer. It’s so simple," Musk explains.

From the beginning, Musk wanted to prove that innovative and nimble Silicon Valley could build a better green car than lumbering, bureaucratic Detroit.

"Out of Detroit everybody thinks that Detroit is dumb," comments Bob Lutz, the vice chairman of General Motors.

"Or they think you’re hide-bound," Stahl remarks.

"Yeah. Same thing," Lutz says.

Lutz is the man in charge of developing GM's new products, and he says he owes Tesla and its Roadster a debt of gratitude. "If a small Silicon Valley start up believes that they can do a commercially viable electric car, are we going to sit here at General Motors and say, 'Well, a guy in California can do it, but we can't?' Well, that didn't sound very good."

Lutz admits that's embarrassing.

And so, the race was on, with Lutz overseeing the research and development of the Chevy Volt, which is a four-door family electric car.

The Volt is not purely electric - it's called a "plug-in hybrid." It'll drive on battery power alone for 40 miles; go beyond that, and a small gasoline engine kicks in to recharge the battery while you keep driving.

"Seventy eight percent of trips in the United States are under 40 miles a day," Lutz tells Stahl. "If all those people had Volts, you would have 78 percent of Americans basically never using another drop of gasoline."

Everything about the Volt, he says, works like a conventional car, except there's no noise. "There's one thing we can do, for people who miss the sound of the engines, we sell them a CD…with various engine sounds. So you'll be able to pick a Ferrari V12 or, you know, Le Mans Corvette," Lutz explains.

GM is already touting the car in TV ads, even though they don't yet have a working prototype. "The real trick on the car is software. The car needs to know where home plate is. So if you, for some reason, have gone from work instead of directly home, you've gone shopping, and you're starting to run out of battery on the way home, the computer will tell the gas engine, 'Look, he's five miles from home, only run for three minutes, because he only needs enough to get home,'" Lutz explains.

What about safety? In 2006, Dell was forced to issue the biggest recall in electronics history when its lithium-ion batteries burst into flames. Lutz says GM has solved that problem with its batteries, but they need a lot more testing to check how durable and reliable they are in extreme weather and real-road conditions. Still, Lutz insists the Volts will be in dealerships by 2010.

"We've spoken to people who say, 'Lutz is crazy.' … they cannot do this by then. It's just not going to happen," Stahl says.

"Right. We'll see. Somebody's going to have egg on their face," Lutz replies.

The rest of the article continues onto page 2, here's the link;
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/05/60minutes/main4502448_page2.shtml

Honda could care less to go electric… for now

Besides Tesla Motors some automakers you think of when you think of an electric-car is GM’s Chevrolet, Toyota, Nissan - but no one thinks Honda (well some of you probably do). That’s because Honda is staying away from electric-cars and according to its r&d chief Masaaki Kato, Honda has no plans to produce electric-vehicles.

“Nowadays, the most advanced batteries are lithium ion batteries. But even though the size is getting smaller, the density of the energy is still too poor for cars,” Kato said.

Kato said that since right now electric-cars offer limited mileage, by 2015 they will account for less than 1 percent of the market in developed countries - a percentage that Honda is not satisfied with.

Toyota, Nissan, Subaru, Mitsubishi all plan on introducing an electric-vehicle within the next 50 years with a range of 60 miles on full-charge.

Source;
www.automotivenews.com (sub. req'd)