What will the EV battery of the future look like?
Lithium’s high production cost requires new alternatives
The future of EV batteries
In order to make lithium-ion batteries cheaper, scientists at Pennsylvania State University in the US are looking at lithium iron phosphate batteries, which use different electrode elements. This battery model is much cheaper and safer than the widely used lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide batteries, and has the potential to power a car250 mileson as little as ten minutes’ charge.
Anxiety around the range fully charged EVs can cover is also driving carmakers to developbatterieswhich use a solid component that separates the electrodes, rather than a liquid one. These are safer and can power EVs further than 300 miles on a single charge.
But lithium batteries have a problem. Lithium is arelatively rareelement on Earth compared with most minerals in common use. As demand for batteries increases, the price of lithium willincrease sharply. This has prompted geologists to search for new sources of lithium worldwide, often with their own high costs. For example, the extraction of lithium from salt flats in Chile consumes lots of water, which isin short supply there. Cobalt is also scarce compared with similar metals like iron, and ores are concentrated in thepolitically unstable Congoregion of Africa.
One solution may be to get more use out of what we already have. With more thana million electric carssold worldwide in 2017, a number increasing rapidly, scientists are studying how to recycle lithium on a massive scale. Some are considering whetherbacteriacould help them achieve this.
In future, it will be important to design batteries that can be easily disassembled, to reuse the metals they contain. Lithium is alsoa very reactive metal, presenting challenges for people tasked with handling it.
There are also potential alternatives to lithium. For example,sodium-ion batteriesare gathering interest from EV manufacturers due to their lower cost. They work similarly to lithium-ion batteries but sodium is heavier and stores less energy.
Somewhat further into the future are multivalent batteries, where the ion that moves between electrodes has a greater charge than lithium and so delivers more than one electron each to the circuit. There are substantial challenges for scientists to overcome with these batteries, but they could potentially deliver evenhigher energy storage.
Building enough electric cars at a price that will make them cheaper than fossil fuelled alternatives isa major challenge. At the fore of battery research, scientists are working to solve this problem and revolutionise how we travel.
This article bySimon Cotton,Senior Lecturer in Chemistry,University of Birmingham, andPeter Raymond Slater, Professor of Materials Chemistry, University of Birmingham, isrepublished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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