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Engineers Develop Electric Car Battery That Can Heat Itself During Winter (popularmechanics.com)
Engineers at Penn State have created a battery that can self-heat, allowing for rapid charging regardless of the outside cold. The battery can reportedly provide a 15-minute rapid charge at all temperatures, even when the cold is as low as minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Popular Mechanics reports: Batteries have both positive and negative terminals. The scientists placed thin nickel foil with one end attached to the negative terminal and the other end creating a third terminal. When a temperature sensor attached to a battery detects that the battery is below room temperature, it then sends electrons flowing through the nickel foil. This heats the battery up until it's above room temperature again. When the sensor detects that the battery is above room temperature, that's the sign that charging that can begin again. Electric current flows into the battery, rapidly charging in a more efficient state. After 4,500 cycles of testing, the new battery only showed a 20 percent capacity loss, which could provide approximately 280,000 miles of driving and a lifetime of 12.5 years. This is compared to a conventional battery that "showed a 20 percent capacity loss after only 50 charges," reports Popular Mechanics. Penn State released a press statement with more details.
Short circuit a battery, and it heats?
Then don't fucking use them if you live in Florida. Buy a normal, cheaper one.
approximately 280,000 miles of driving and a lifetime of 12.5 years.
So which comes first, the 280,000 miles or the 12.5 years? Rather few people are going to get anywhere near that mileage, my car is 12 years old and only has 160,000 miles on it and I thought that I did a lot of driving.
essentially a resistance heater in an electricity storage device.. for when the natural heat generated from charging isn't 'enough' to keep a suitable temperature?
wow. it took 'til 2018 to come up with that?
next you're gonna tell me they got a cooler for batteries for use in hot climates.....
A group of Tesla owners on the Dutch-Belgium Tesla Forum are gathering data from over 350 Tesla vehicles across the world and frequently updating it in a public Google file. We have previously reported on the data, but they have since added many more vehicles and those vehicles have been driving a lot more – completing more battery cycles. The data clearly shows that for the first 50,000 miles (100,000 km), most Tesla battery packs will lose about 5% of their capacity, but after the 50,000-mile mark, the capacity levels off and it looks like it could be difficult to make a pack degrade by another 5%.
https://electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-battery-degradation-data/
The trend line currently suggests that the average battery pack could cycle through over 300,000 km (186,000) before coming close to 90% capacity.
If they say it can go 4500 cycles with a 20% degradation, then assuming a linear drop, a total distance of 280,000 miles implies...
280000/4500/0.9 -> 70 miles of range.
That's a compliance car. Even the Leaf is over 100 miles now, and most are over 200.
Ok so everyone insisting that cold climates didn't affect EVs so I should definitely get an EV.... was lying to me?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
This sounds like it may be a nice solution for heating the battery during charging, but you also need to both heat and cool batteries during driving to keep them in the optimal temperature range. Can this also be used while also drawing power to drive the vehicle? It sounds like it only works with external power.
So if you assume that the battery will have external heating and cooling anyway, the elegance of the solution is lost, and now it's back to the question of whether this method of heating the battery is more efficient than using a traditional heating system.
Yep. For almost any battery pack with active cooling, you could achieve the same thing by adjusting the cooling.
Ezekiel 23:20
essentially a resistance heater in an electricity storage device.. for when the natural heat generated from charging isn't 'enough' to keep a suitable temperature?
wow. it took 'til 2018 to come up with that?
next you're gonna tell me they got a cooler for batteries for use in hot climates.....
Basically, a PetSmart aquarium heater in the electrolyte. Generations of Canadians have known that hair dryers are Really Good Things at 4:AM and it's -30C and you car *MUST* *START* *NOW*. (Or, usually, within 15 minutes.)
The concept of heating a battery is nothing new. And I applaud any effort which brings practical renewable energy to any environment.
The gasoline engine is an absolutely beautiful thing, but it is an inefficient machine, and it wastes the vast majority of its input energy as the heat that burns your hands on the exhaust manifold.
If you're espousing electric cars as the way of the future, are you sure you want to be wasting precious electricity as heat? I'd be far more impressed if those heaters were off-spec GPUs working World Community Grid problems, mining currency, or, maybe somehow part of the autonomous driving system.
We're bragging that we've invented the Battery With A Shelf Life. We're celebrating a car which intentionally leaks its own fuel.
I'll celebrate if they improved the battery technology enough that hair dryers weren't waking up neighbours at 4:AM.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I take issue with your "Not useful in Florida" title.
Sure, in Florida (at normal temperatures) the battery/controller would go straight to charging (and the normal cooling fans or whatever would kick in once it got hot enough). So it would work just fine, though it wouldn't use the "heat me up first" feature.
Until some winter when you drive up to Michigan, Quebeck, Alaska, or the nearest ski mountain or place where your kids can make snowballs, park it overnight at a motel or resort (because all the charging stations are full), then charge it in the morning while you eat breakfast. Oops! THEN you'll want the feature to be installed.
(It's really low weight, so hauling around a extra power transistor and some nickel foil heating elements doesn't cut into your mileage.)
So even if you don't actually use it in Florida it's still useful there - to the dealer selling you the car. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yeah, it never gets that cold in Florida. That's why they never had problems with shuttle launches, and orange growers never panic about freezing.
I'll agree that it's rare to drop below freezing, but it does happen.
Also, it's not clear to me that the optimal charging temperature is anything above freezing. That's not a magic temperature when dealing with battery chemistry. I know my Tesla starts to have reduced regenerative braking below 45 or so until the pack warms up. For high speed charging, they'll probably want to heat to 45 or 50 for best results.
Seriously, if you don't want/need something don't fucking buy/steal or otherwise acquire the god damn thing. The market place, like the universe, doens't revolve around your sorry ass.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
How far we have fallen if this is news.
Hey dumbass, Florida is more than Miami. It even snowed a few days in much of the panhandle this past winter.
Use thermal expansion coefficient to allow terminals to touch when cold (when it heats up sufficiently the terminals will disconnect) . In case this isn't obvious I am placing it in the public domain.
While this looks good I can't tolerate inaccurate reporting. It makes me wonder the validating of what is being reported. In this case, " This is compared to a conventional battery that "showed a 20 percent capacity loss after only 50 charges," Statements like this hold 1% truth and 99% bull. Yes, if you totally drain a lead-acid battery and allow the gases to escape this might be true. But a sealed lead-acid battery that is discharged by the normal starting of a vehicle will be no where near this bad.
Simply think for a minute. This would mean if you started you car twice a day, for 1 month, just one month your battery would have lost 20% of it's ability to hold a charge. So after 5 months your battery would be worthless and not hold a charge or close to it???????
So, we'll see this along with those 1990 video games that we're still waiting to play that never appeared, N'est pas?
I thought Samsung invented those....
On the longer term, we are warming the globe quickly enough that these cold specific solutions will no longer be necessary.
Well, KSC is pretty far north. South Florida it doesn't even hit freezing.
Adding a heating coil to the charging circuit while plugged in is quite trivial.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
a beowulf cluster of these!
Instead of building a dedicated battery heater, Model 3 simply uses the motor's coils as a resistive heater. This can easily provide more than enough heat to bring up batteries to a comfortable temperature within minutes.
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This is compared to a conventional battery that "showed a 20 percent capacity loss after only 50 charges
Were they comparing their batteries to Nickel Cadmium? Seriously, my Nissan Leaf is at 33,000 with only one bar 1/12 missing. I even have a set of snow tires for the Michigan winter.
... fuel cells. The batteries are a stop gap. We need air breathing fuel cells to compete with hydrocarbon internal combustion engines.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Your temperature units are so shitty that you have to cut them in half for a thermostat. Your mass unit is so terrible that you had to multiply it by a thousand to be useful.
So it seems there is no real logic to the sensor...if ambient temp is low, it heats.
I live in MN. What happens if this battery is sitting in a car outside when it -reasonably frequently - is -35c for a week? How much of the charge is them eaten by constant heating?
-Styopa
This is kinda lame; It's just resistive heating! There's nothing clever about that! And it's been done!
Heck, even diesel engines have similar heaters to heat the fuel lines in colder countries!
And this isn't even particularly good - a strip of nickle?! Why not use coils between the cell packs for more surface area? Or something surrounding the coolant loop if it has one?
The worst thing about this is it wastes loads of battery power - Using electricity to generate heat is relatively efficient but uses a LOT of battery power; Power that would be far more useful in propelling the car!
When we invent a better way of storing electricity then it won't be so bad to waste it like this, but at the moment given most electric cars can't even do 100 miles on a single charge I don't think this is a good idea at all.
A little gas heater could do the job without wasting the limited electrical reserves.
Also, Toyota HSDs have already shown that, with careful battery management, you can extend the life of a battery greatly; There are people with Mk2 Priuses (Over 10 years old!) who are still on the original battery and still with useful capacity, and those are NiMH! People were predicting those would be killed within 2 years by the memory effect!
Mod down. I didn't need to read that post, so it is over rated.
Your temperature units are so shitty that you have to cut them in half for a thermostat. Your mass unit is so terrible that you had to multiply it by a thousand to be useful.
Ouch! What a burn! I am sure the rest of the world looks upon the non-metric system with envy.
They don't use it because they hate our freedom.