Tesla is launching a new wildly overpriced solid-state hard drive to hold video games and Sentry Mode videos.
The post Tesla launches wildly overpriced solid-state drive for video games and Sentry Mode appeared first on Electrek.
Source: Charge Forward
The single cab electric truck looks very much production ready, but Toyota did not reveal a launch date.
Source: Electric Vehicle News
Compared to Europe’s strictly regulated electric bicycle market, the US has fewer restrictions on e-bikes. Bosch, one of the leading electric bicycle drive system manufacturers in Europe, hopes to see that change through the implementation of tighter safety regulations.
The post Bosch urges US to adopt stricter e-bike regulations that helped it dominate European market appeared first on Electrek.
Source: Charge Forward
Battery recycling specialist Redwood Materials has announced its next expansion in the US, which includes a new battery materials campus in Charleston, South Carolina. As Redwood’s Easternmost facility in the US, it joins the “Battery Belt” corridor growing between Michigan and Georgia.
The post Redwood Materials announces South Carolina as home to next US battery campus appeared first on Electrek.
Source: Charge Forward
BMW is building a battery assembly plant in Hungary for its Neue Klasse vehicles. It will be located on the site of the Debrecen vehicle production plant, for which construction was begun about six months ago.
Markus Fallböhmer, BMW’s Senior VP of Battery Production, explains: “The BMW iFACTORY is also about ensuring short distances for logistics. The close link between battery assembly and vehicle production is part of our strategy.”
BMW plans to assemble all batteries for the vehicles from Plant Debrecen onsite at the 140,000-square-meter facility. The sixth-generation round battery cells will be assembled into a metal battery housing which is later integrated into the underbody of the car.
The company aims to create more than 500 jobs and invest over two billion euros in the construction and launch of the entire plant by the end of 2025. BMW is hiring and training in Debrecen. It plans to work with local educational organizations to launch a dual education program in autumn 2023 at its in-house training center.
Production of both vehicles and batteries at the site is slated to begin in 2025.
Source: BMW
Source: Electric Vehicles Magazine
Buick will introduce its first EV developed on GM’s new Ultium platform later this year in China. Deliveries of the five-seat SUV will begin in the first half of 2023 and will be followed by a second Ultium-based EV by the end of next year.
Buick’s Ultium-based EV will be equipped with a battery cell made specifically for the Chinese market, along with GM’s “nearly wireless” battery management system. It will also feature the enhanced Super Cruise driver assist technology, as well as the Virtual Cockpit System jointly developed by GM and PATAC (GM’s automotive engineering and design joint venture in Shanghai).
Buick plans to open up to 58 Buick EV City Showrooms across the country, and more than 600 Buick NEV Zones across its dealership network. The best-selling GM brand in China also plans to install over 400,000 charging poles across the country by the end of 2023.
“With the Ultium platform at their core, the new models will play a strategic role for Buick in China’s highly competitive EV market,” said Cesar Toledo, General Director of Buick Sales and Marketing at SAIC-GM.
Source: GM
Source: Electric Vehicles Magazine
ZF has introduced new electric drives with a modular and compact design for electric passenger cars and light commercial vehicles. The new e-drives, which incorporate an electric motor, gearbox, power electronics and DC-DC converters, will be available on the market as a complete system starting in 2025, but the company will bring individual components into series production earlier.
The power electronics include a discretely structured inverter with individual power semiconductor switches, which ZF says offers better performance scalability than is possible with complex power modules. ZF also says its “discrete package technology” requires fewer types of components than using conventional power modules.
The e-motor features a new cooling concept that allows oil to flow directly around the copper rods—the point at which most heat is generated during operation. ZF has increased continuous power to up to 85 percent of the peak power. ZF says the motor uses almost no heavy rare earths, and it features a braided winding technology that reduces required installation space by 10 percent.
A new coaxial reduction gearbox sports two integrated planetary gears that generate the desired axle ratio and include the fully integrated differential function. ZF says that, compared to common offset concepts, the new solution reduces weight and installation space requirements without compromising efficiency, noise or vibration.
ZF’s new high-voltage converter boasts an efficiency rating of 99.6 percent.
“We are focusing on three basic systems that meet our customers’ main requirements, namely efficiency, performance and cost, even in the standard version,” explains Markus Schwabe, Product Line Manager Electrified Powertrain Systems. “On this basis, we can optimally implement further individual customer requirements in e-vehicles of all segments.”
Source: ZF
Source: Electric Vehicles Magazine
Cell manufacturer FREYR Battery has entered into an agreement with Aleees, a Taiwan-based LFP cathode battery material producer. The agreement gives FREYR a worldwide license to produce and sell LFP cathode material based on Aleees’s technology, and to build production facilities using Aleees’s industrial expertise.
Aleees offers complete LFP cathode battery material manufacturing technology and related patents to customers, primarily within the energy storage and EV battery spaces.
FREYR anticipates that the agreement will enable it to meet the future LFP cathode material needs of its Giga Arctic battery production facility in Mo i Rana, Norway, and possibly also its planned Giga America project in the US.
Dr. Tilo Hauke, FREYR’s EVP of Supply Chain Management, says the agreement will help his company to build a strong, localized supply chain for raw materials. “There is high global demand at present for active cathode material, and LFP material in particular. By consummating this licensing agreement with Aleees, FREYR is well-positioned to achieve speed and scale of LFP cathode production for our Giga Arctic battery manufacturing plant and beyond. Aleees is one of the best-established LFP cathode producers outside of China, and is recognized for their world-class production technology.”
Aleees is an approved supplier of LFP cathode material to 24M Technologies, FREYR’s US-based partner. 24M’s SemiSolid technology platform features a larger and thicker electrode design that is intended to deliver higher energy density while reducing production costs.
“We are [now] in a solid position to localize and decarbonize battery cell production and their supply chains in the Nordic region,” said FREYR co-founder and CEO Tom Einar Jensen. “LFP cathode materials comprise 40% or more of the cost of a battery cell and currently account for more than 45% of the projected full-cycle supply-chain carbon footprint of cells. In cooperation with Aleees, FREYR is positioned to become a low-cost and low-carbon producer of LFP cathode material.”
Source: FREYR Battery
Source: Electric Vehicles Magazine
It might seem that the government of Ukraine has more urgent matters to worry about at the moment than promoting EVs. However, the war has provided the most powerful reminder imaginable of the importance of phasing out fossil fuels. Furthermore, Ukraine is one of the largest markets for trucks in Europe. So in fact, it’s quite logical that, during COP27, Ukraine signed a Global Memorandum of Understanding regarding the electrification of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles.
The signatory countries (26 at last count, including the US) aim to phase out sales of fossil-fueled medium- and heavy-duty vehicles by 2040, and to eliminate carbon emissions from these vehicle classes by 2050. It’s a non-binding agreement, but it does include an interim target of making 30% of new truck sales zero-emission by 2030, and there is an action plan that includes recommendations for action to help signatory countries reach their targets.
“Ukraine is going through difficult times,” said Oleksandr Kubrakov, Ukraine’s Minister of Infrastructure. “But we are confident in our victory, and we understand its importance for the entire civilized world. That is why we are ready to sign agreements related to the future. Our country fully understands and supports important decisions to preserve the planet’s ecology.”
Local EV advocacy association Avere Ukraine provided the impetus for the country to join the Global MOU.
“Now our country has perhaps the strongest motivation in the world to never again depend on imported fossil fuels, which have already brought so much trouble to Ukraine and the world,” said Avere Ukraine President Denys Radiuk. “The partnership under this memorandum accelerates investments in infrastructure according to the principle of ‘Build Back Better,’ renewal of the transport fleet, flexibility in the choice of energy sources, for the continuity of critical logistics functions in case of fuel disruptions, and, most importantly, in the total transition to the use of our own local energy with zero CO2 emissions and environmental damage.”
Source: Avere
Source: Electric Vehicles Magazine
Thermal runaway propagation is a complex challenge. No matter the cell chemistry or pack architecture, lithium-ion batteries are at risk of experiencing a thermal runaway event. Although there is no one-size-fits-all solution, battery engineers do not need to reinvent the wheel when developing a solution to meet critical safety requirements. By understanding the intricacies of each stage of thermal runaway, engineers can discover which levers to pull to achieve their performance and safety goals.
What is Thermal Runaway?
Lithium-ion batteries generate a small amount of heat as they cycle. The chemical reactions within the cells can speed up when triggered by mechanical (e.g., punctured cell), electrical (e.g., overcharging), and thermal abuse (e.g., overheating). As the temperature increases, the cell loses the ability to dissipate heat, which can result in the cell catching fire (i.e., thermal runaway). Thermal runaway in a single cell is a maintenance event but can quickly propagate to other cells — thermal propagation – which is a safety issue.
Thermal Propagation Over Short and Long Timescales
Current guidelines recommend that all passengers must be able to safely exit the vehicle within the first five minutes of a thermal runaway event being detected. As battery engineers better understand the technology, more rigorous regulations and increased timetables are likely on the horizon. The ultimate goal is to create non-propagating systems, but the industry has a long way to go.
Shorter-Term
The first few minutes of a thermal runaway event are explosive and violent. Understanding these mechanisms is crucial to mitigate thermal propagation to meet five-minute regulations.
1. Cell-to-Cell Conduction
Cell conduction occurs when energy from the trigger cell transfers to an adjacent cell via face-to-face contact. The heat developed within pouch and prismatic cells is shared with the two adjacent cells, while cylindrical cells will generally share with six neighbors (edge/corner effects notwithstanding).
An effective cell-to-cell (C2C) barrier is the first line of defense to combat thermal propagation, serving as a firewall between adjacent cells. It should be a conductive barrier, insulator, or firewall between cells. During thermal runaway, a C2C barrier’s role is to protect adjacent cells from the trigger cell. It should be as thin as possible, provide exceptionally high thermal resistance while compressed, and resist temperatures of 850°C or higher.
PyroThin is an industry-leading cell-to-cell barrier because it provides thermal and mechanical protection over a vehicle’s entire lifecycle in an ultrathin, lightweight format. Aspen’s unique aerogel technology enables PyroThin to act as both compression pad and fire barrier. PyroThin is a tunable platform that can be customized to meet thermal, compression response, and thickness requirements.
2. Primary Combustion
Gas management is key to making a non-propagating design. The ejection of gas from a cell occurs in two steps:
Gas management is critical to extending propagation delay times beyond the five-minute threshold. Unless properly controlled, hot gases can rapidly spread over the top and sides of the modules, directly triggering adjacent cells, and short-circuiting all the other protective mechanisms.
3. Hot-Particulate Ejection
In addition to releasing hot gases from a cell in runaway, there is often the high-velocity expulsion of hot particulates including molten aluminum, melted or carbonized plastic bits, and solid chunks of copper. These particulates make the problem of gas management even harder, as they subject the surrounding areas to both heat and concentrated erosive blast for as much as 60 seconds.
Longer-Term
Containing a thermal runaway event with PyroThin can be like catching a wild animal — it begs the question: “Now what?” All that thermal energy must still be drained away, and there are multiple pathways for it to run down. As described below, each pathway must be controlled, so all that contained heat does not flow into the adjacent cells.
4. Secondary Conductive Pathways Kick In
As thermal propagation events run longer, secondary conduction pathways become critical and there are a lot of them, including:
5. Natural Convection Across Air Gaps
Natural convection (as opposed to the pressure-driven convection during active venting) occurs when hot combustion products spreads across and around the module, directly heating the adjacent cells.
6. Active Cooling
Active cooling is a wild card because a vehicle’s thermal management system may not always be intact and functional, especially in a post-crash scenario. If available, active cooling systems can – over long enough time scales — absorb excess heat and reject it safely. Thermal management systems are generally ineffective during the initial five-minute period of a thermal runaway event because the heat generation rate overwhelms the system’s heat-rejection capacity. However, over longer timescales (e.g., 15, 30, 60-minutes), active cooling is good at removing the excess thermal energy and rejecting it, helping mitigate thermal propagation.
When developing a thermal propagation prevention strategy, battery engineers should keep all the above pathways in mind. In recent mini-module testing, PyroThin repeatedly stopped thermal runaway propagation on a cell-to-cell level. While only a piece of the puzzle, isolating cell-to-cell conduction and proving that thermal runaway can be stopped allows the focus to shift to other pathways.
Aspen Aerogels offers robust engineering design and prototyping support. To learn more about PyroThin or to schedule a meeting with our technical team, visit Aspen Aerogel’s website.
