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Developing A Better, Cheaper Electric Car Battery

Interdisciplinary teams at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are addressing many pressing issues in energy and the automotive industry. One major project is producing a high-performance electric car battery that is reliable, safe, and less expensive. Materials scientist Jun Liu is leading a team to develop a battery pack with a specific energy of 500 watt-hours per kilogram. Today, a typical electric car battery has 170-200 watt hours per kilogram, less than half of what the team would like. The researchers plan to replace the graphite used on the negative electrode in a typical electric vehicle with lithium metal, which can store more energy for the same amount of weight.

Topics:
Automotive Batteries Energy Energy Efficiency Materials Power Transportation

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    Transcript

    00:00:10 at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will one of 17 Department of Energy national laboratories that are focused on areas of fundamental science discovery understanding the universe around us looking at applied solutions and some of the problems facing as an energy the environment and national security we have on about 4,400 scientists engineers and support

    00:00:34 professionals who are working a wide range of disciplines and applying their expertise to a number of problems we have about a billion dollars in total funding primarily from the department of energy from the office of science for fundamental discovery research from the applied programs in d OE including work that we're doing for the automotive industry funded by eere or the office of

    00:00:57 energy efficiency and renewable energy so we work at Pacific Northwest National Lab on a wide range of vehicle technologies we have efforts in batteries we have efforts and lightweight materials advanced lubricants emissions control we have a strong catalysis program we use for things like reduced diesel emissions exhaust we do a lot of work on joining

    00:01:18 lightweight materials to let vehicle industry use the new alloys that are being developed actually be able to integrate those into a vehicle cotton Tony we have several provinces of batteries are using electrical vehicles one is that the police don't have enough energy to drive long distance per charge oh my goal is try to reduce production costs and improve the energy density and

    00:01:46 also improve the safety of batteries for this purpose we start with a very fundamental study to understand the material properties from atomic scale to larger battery so once we use we use advanced the crack decision techniques and Warsaw computers munition to have a better understanding on how patterning material work and white bright we feel once we develop new materials we will

    00:02:14 try to scale up to a practical product which more acceptable for industry we're really trying to pioneer the research and advancing the use of the similar material whether that be carbon fiber aluminum steel all of these new materials create new challenges in order to implement them whether that be in joining informing so we are trying to come up and develop these innovative

    00:02:43 technologies within joining and forming such as purchased escribe where we can join carbon fiber to aluminum this is important to us because being able to implement and advance the use of the similar material will allow us to create these fuel efficient energy efficient vehicles for the future in many of our projects we are striving very hard to develop fundamental properties

    00:03:08 fundamental principles of new materials and new manufacturing processes but the real goal is to implement them to be able to commercialize that technology so we work very strongly towards a path from fundamental discovery to commercialization the research scientist I work on composite tanks for hydrogen fuel vehicles and as part of the vehicle technologies sector relationship manager

    00:03:31 I work on helping our research scientists collaborate with other research institutions with industry partners to really make sure that the technologies that are developed can have a real impact on the world that we can get these technologies out into the real world where they're rolling down the road one promising new technology is a process called shape which stands for

    00:03:50 shear assisted processing and extrusion shape is a solid-state process that utilizes simultaneous rotational and linear share during extrusion using the shape process we're able to turn powder flake and solid billets directly into extruded rods and tubes that have unique mechanical electrical and magnetic properties enabled by our one-of-a-kind machine the shape process is being used

    00:04:12 to extrude a variety of materials such as magnesium aluminum steel magnets and even semiconductors technologies we develop here for vehicles right now are helping reduce emissions for heavy trucks reduce weight for a range of consumer and heavy vehicles and in the future we're seeing a lot of effort in vehicle electrification all-electric cars and

    00:04:36 area that's very exciting right now is grid integration and and connected vehicles autonomous vehicles we're we're we're looking at cars not as discrete units on the road but as part of a system of transportation that's really going to be the revolution in the next 20 years of vehicles pnnl just celebrated our 50th anniversary as the National Laboratory last year and when I

    00:04:58 look ahead I'm very excited about what the next 50 years will bring for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory