Making EV Batteries More Efficient and Affordable
Virginia Tech’s Feng Lin is out to strengthen the domestic supply chain for EV batteries. His goal is to make EVs affordable to all people and, of course, to decarbonize the economy by making transportation as green as possible. See the technology the team uses to test its batteries.
Transcript
00:00:01 At the moment, there's a great need to develop better batteries for electric vehicle use. So our technology is really taking, from the ground level, innovating the key components in the batteries to make these batteries at very low cost. Meanwhile, delivering the best performance that can
00:00:25 make electric vehicles available and affordable to all people. So what we use the glove box for is mostly for our safety and protection. We have it under inert argon atmosphere so that none of our materials have any parasitic side reactions or have any some sort of oxidation with normal air, so we keep it an inert environment.
00:00:47 And this is where we build all of our cells and we kind of lay out all of our cell parts, put it together, layer it one-by-one on top of each other. And then we're able to go forward with cell testing. Once we make the battery inside the glove box, we will transfer them in
00:01:04 an environmental chamber that can go up to as high as 150 degrees Celsius. It can also go down to as low as negative 20 degrees Celsius. Just to simulate all kind of use conditions of electric vehicles. Once we connect the cells to the battery testing machine, it can do the charging and discharging by itself.
00:01:26 We just says that we want one thousand cycles on this particular cell. And the machine will do the charging and discharging for us. And the cell size is the cell size that we put into your watch. And for this project, we're specifically looking at the long cycle, life, low temperature performance, and fast charging capability.
00:01:46 On the global scale, this is really about how to decarbonize the economy. How to make our transportation– air transportation, ocean transportation. Can we electrify them? And then make the transportation to be as green, as clean as possible.