The future of car batteries: what will we do and how much will we drive?

Over the last decade, electric cars would not have been able to develop as quickly without the development of batteries that could save more energy for a long time – such batteries can be recharged multiple times and do not change others.

The batteries needed by the automotive industry were lithium-ion batteries. The invention must be thanked to the scientist born in Germany, John Bennister Goodenough, writes autoevolution.com. The concept of such batteries was born in 1980, when a cobalt oxide cathode battery was invented. However, for the first time, Japanese trade was only used by Sony in 1991.

As neither JB Goodenough nor the Oxford University Chemistry Laboratory, in which he worked, did not patent the invention, each electronics company set itself the goal of developing its own versions of this technology, not to mention JB Goodenough or the University of Oxford. The success of the invention has had no financial benefit.

Finally, the concept of lithium-ion battery covers a variety of versions depending on the chemicals used.

Lithium oxide and cobalt (LiCoO2) is commonly used in consumer electronics, while the automotive industry chooses cobalt oxide and lithium-nickel- manganese (LiNiMnCoO2 or NMC).

Lithium-ion technology, although it is not completely secure (sometimes it is said that its batteries explode or ignite), is currently the best choice when it is safe to use. It acts to drive an undesirable driving distance and a battery charging power.

Lithium ion batteries

Lithium-ion batteries consist of positive and negative electrodes, called anode and cathode, and electrolyte. As we know from school, the electrical current between two electrodes must be distributed in a support medium, which in this case is provided by an electrolyte.

Lithium-ion batteries contain an electrolyte in liquid form. These may include lithium salts, such as LiPF6, LiBF4 or LiClO4, or organic solvents such as methylene carbonate, dimethyl carbonate or diethyl carbonate.

The main task of an electrolyte is to be the conductor of an electric current that, during discharge, goes from a negative electrode to a positive electrode. Due to the design method, lithium ion batteries have sufficient energy density to be used in a variety of industries, ranging from smart phones to electric cars.

However, at the present time, lithium-ion batteries have almost fully exploited their full potential. By increasing the driving distance of electric cars, only the capacity of these batteries can be used, which can be squeezed out.

This means that the 500 km targeted by most of the most expensive and expensive electric cars already represents the upper limit that this type of battery can offer. What the automotive industry needs, is a more powerful technology, capable of doubling the distance of electric cars.

Batteries in the solid state

As for lithium-ion batteries, batteries in the solid state consist of positive and negative electrodes and an electrolyte. The only difference and the most important is that the electrolyte of these batteries is not liquid but solid.

Such solid electrolytes can be any solid material, starting with ceramics and glbad and terminating with lithium sulfide. Work on these batteries has been in place since the 1960s, but little progress has been made to date.

For the automotive industry, such batteries would be a big step forward. Solid state batteries have higher power density, better security and faster charging capabilities. They are also much lower than the current technology used in electric cars.

The big problem with such batteries is that they are extremely expensive to manufacture. Toyota has been refining this technology for decades and has delivered these batteries to the market at the earliest in 2022.

In 2010, the delivered prototype could have been used safely at temperatures up to 100 degrees Celsius – liquid electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries would have forced such a thermal overload. Volkswagen also announced last month that it was accelerating its efforts to build batteries in solid state.

They intend to deliver this company at the same time as Toyota. Volkswagen says its batteries will increase by more than twice the driving distance of the E-Golf from 300 km to 750 km.