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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.
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.
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.
15K miles per year is pretty close to average when taking age grouping into account.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
EVs work fine in the cold, but it does reduce their range. A friend of mine used the same cells that Tesla uses to power a light for his dog sled in the Iditarod, and it worked flawlessly at 40 below.
Some cars do worse in the winter than others. My Tesla may lose a third of its range in extreme cold while my Leaf loses more than half. Whether this makes a particular EV impractical for you depends on the car and your needs.
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
Different on different instances of the car. But it doesn't matter.
The batteries have more than one mode of ageing. One is driven mainly by time-since-manufacture, others by cycling. So after you drive it for 280,000 miles in, say, eight years OR park it for 12.5 years on a trickle charger, don't expect the car to work well any more (or the manufacturer's warranty to still be in force).
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.
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.
I thought Samsung invented those....
OR park it for 12.5 years on a trickle charger
You don't trickle charge a lithium chemistry battery. This is the #1 cause of lithium battery fires and explosions. To store them for long periods of disuse, you have to charge them to a storage charge (typically 50%) at which point they are good for about 2-3 years of storage. After that, they need to be restored to their storage charge again. Storing Lithium batteries at full charge accelerates internal corrosion (anode gets oxidized iirc), and will reduce the total lifespan of the battery by half or more.
Properly cared for, a lithium chemistry battery will still have 75% of its total capacity after 15 years and 1000 complete charge discharge cycles (or 5000 20% charge cycles) This means keeping them within their proper operating temperature and not charging / discharging them when they are too cold or too hot.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Adding a heating coil to the charging circuit while plugged in is quite trivial.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Ok so everyone insisting that cold climates didn't affect EVs so I should definitely get an EV.... was lying to me?
Anyone saying that cold climates do not affect EV's either weren't specific enough in what they meant or were smoking something.
As stated by another poster, cold weather and more specifically, a cold battery, affects the range of the vehicle. I've read that it can be up to a 40% loss in distance.
Personally, I live in the New England area and would not feel comfortable owning an EV as my primary vehicle. Between cold snaps, winter storms, traffic, and some of the distances that I drive, there is, in my opinion, a much wider range of safety latitude running an ICE vehicle vs an EV.
But that's just my opinion. Everyone has different driving needs and an EV might be a better fit for you.
My MacBook Pro is now 7 years old, is used daily and still has 84% of its original capacity so you must be right. That is good news for me because I hope it will male the 15 years, considering the abysmal rubbish Apple has on the market now.
-- Cheers!
Make, not male.
Why does THE site for nerds have such an archaic posting feature?
-- Cheers!
Why does THE site for nerds have such an archaic posting feature?
Well, because nerds are very conservative when it comes to technology.
Nerds typically won't switch to new software unless it has been proven to be better than the old at almost everything.
Also, I wouldn't be so sure about Slashdot being "THE site for nerds".
It's more like the site for old farts who used to be nerds in the 90's.
You know, back in the days when Slashdot loaded quickly and had a better design.
... 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.
Ok so everyone insisting that cold climates didn't affect EVs so I should definitely get an EV.... was lying to me?
No. What you should do is get out of that anti EV echo chamber you and all your other nutters seem to hang about in.
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
Spot on, LOL.
-- Cheers!
I've got a 2008 VW Jetta with 255000 miles on it...
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.