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Lithium Metal Batteries Could Triple EV Ranges, And They’re Getting Closer. If you ask people for their number one concern about making the jump to an electric vehicle, driving range will pretty much always be the answer. No matter how many press releases automakers send out touting incremental improvements, people still worry about being left stranded. The reason is simple: even with Level 2 equipment, it still takes several hours to charge up an EV, and people know they don’t have that kind of time. Even a DC Fast Charger (if your car supports it) takes most of an hour if you want more than 80% of your range. There are two ways that automakers can increase the range of an existing EV platform. They can put in more batteries, or they can improve the energy storage capacity
Credit: Digital Trends•
Lithium metal batteries could triple EV ranges, and they’re getting closer
If you ask people for their number one concern about making the jump to an electric vehicle, driving range will pretty much always be the answer. No matter how many press releases automakers send out touting incremental improvements, people still worry about being left stranded. The reason is simple: even with Level 2 equipment, it still takes several hours to charge up an EV, and people know they don’t have that kind of time. Even a DC Fast Charger (if your car supports it) takes most of an hour if you want more than 80% of your range.
There are two ways that automakers can increase the range of an existing EV platform. They can put in more batteries, or they can improve the energy storage capacity of the batteries. Adding more batteries means more weight and more expense, which makes increased capacity the holy grail of EV development. That’s what researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada have been pursuing, and one good answer may be found in lithium metal battery technology.
What is a lithium metal battery?
Lithium metal batteries are not new. You can find them at any grocery store checkout line. Typically, the difference between a lithium metal battery and a lithium-ion or lithium polymer battery is that you can recharge the ion and polymer versions, but not the lithium metal variety.
The increased storage capacity could triple EV ranges compared to existing battery tech.
Lithium is considered the best available battery anode material because it carries the highest theoretical capacity and lowest electrochemical potential of all known candidate elements. But the material has several drawbacks. Repeated charge and discharge cycles can cause microscopic structural changes that lead to internal short circuits, or merely to reduced battery life.
However, researchers at Waterloo University have made significant progress using negative electrodes made of lithium metal, and their work has the potential to dramatically increase battery storage capacity.
“This will mean cheap, safe, long-lasting batteries that give people much more range,” said Quanquan Pang, who led the research while he was a PhD candidate at Waterloo.
The increased storage capacity, which is also known as energy density, could boost EV ranges by a factor of three compared to existing battery technologies.
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