‘This technology can be widely used’

Researchers in Korea believe they have found a way to increase the life and energy density of electric vehicle batteries.

Their findings were published in January’s edition of the journal ACS Nano. The research team from Pohang University of Science and Technology looked at how adding a multi-walled carbon nanotube on the surface of battery electrodes would impact battery life.

As the university reported (via Phys.org), this addition prevented cracks from appearing within the battery, improving its performance and lifespan.

When using this technology, batteries retained about 78% of their initial capacity after 1,000 charge and discharge cycles. And researchers say it can be easily implemented within current battery manufacturing processes.

“With a different approach from existing ones, this research effectively controlled changes that could occur to a battery during the charging and discharging process,” lead researcher Kyu-Young Park said in a release. “This technology can be widely used, not only in the secondary battery industry, but also in various industries where material durability is important.”

This finding is important because of the degradation that typically occurs within batteries, in particular EV batteries. 

As the research team noted, a battery’s charging process causes materials within it to repeatedly expand and contract, which can cause small cracks throughout the battery. These cracks can cause a battery’s performance to decline significantly over its lifespan.

Although EVs don’t burn any gas (giving them a significantly lower carbon impact than vehicles with internal combustion engines), critics point to the material mining that’s necessary to create EV batteries and to the waste that discarded batteries can create.

Many studies and breakthroughs are showing that EV battery improvements are coming, which should put even more EVs on the road. Along with this study out of Korea, there are others suggesting that EV batteries may last longer than first thought, and that if a replacement battery is even needed, the cost is coming way down.

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