Car Science: 6 minute charging
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Hey,
I just got back from Le Mans, which is why I didn't send Car Science last week (I sincerely intended to write it on my phone and send it because I'd forgotten Circuit de la Sarthe has minus numbers of signal unless you stand on top of the ferris wheel in a thunderstorm) and I'm going to a synthetic fuel factory tomorrow, which is why this is going out today.
I was gonna write this one about a cool new ultra-rigid, vibration-resistent material I was reading about last week but my brain is too stupid to cope with understanding buckling nanostructures right now so we're going back to old and comfortingly familiar territory: battery anodes. Yes, no more pretending to know about concrete or whatever, we're back on the good stuff.
The excuse for talking about anodes is because today Nyobolt have unveiled a concept car that can charge to full in six minutes. Six minutes! That's barely enough time to get a service station coffee.
I don't know whether you call it based or inspired or whatever when it shares a designer but the Nyobolt concept is certainly from the people who brought you the Lotus Elise. Which is what most of the headlines are about because when the Elise came out in 1994 everyone was unstoppably horny about it for about a decade after and it turns out, in our goblin little car boy hearts, we still are.
Julian Thompson making good looking cars aside (and it really is nice) what's interesting from the perspective of this newsletter is what's achieving that ultra-fast charging time. Which takes a little bit of digging beyond the press release.
Nyobolt was founded in 2019 by Professor Clare Grey and Dr Sai Shivareddy. Both of them are Cambridge academics (it's where Grey teaches and Shivareddy got his PhD in energy storage) and are experienced in the battery field at the real bleeding edge of technology. That makes a big difference from a lot of startups that make outrageous claims about the technology available to them, especially since Nyobolt has taken years to develop this into something that is actually viable.
Nyobolt is also fairly sensible-looking as a company. Not guzzling down venture capital like no tomorrow, actually staffed, with actual products by the time it launched. I don't really know what the accounts of an early stage startup should look like but their's from 2022 aren't bad. A few million in assets, nothing apparently crazy going on.
Why I'm saying all that is because 'six minute EV charging' tends towards the stupid end of bullshit. Things like the probably-definitely-questionably-real Nano FlowCell who claimed to have used probably-not-unobtanium in order to make flow battery electrolyte at energy densities previously unheard of. Or my favourite people, Karma, whose one weird trick for rapid EV refuelling was that it, uh, emitted CO2 via an onboard methanol reformer.
The good news
There's usually a catch is what I'm saying. And there slightly is here, which we might as well get out of the way first: the battery being charged in six minutes is 35kWh, which is getting on for a third the size of the one in a lot of higher-end EVs being sold today. There will be some non-linear scaling for charging bigger battery constructions (a lot of the charging speed is in the way the charge is managed) and although I'd need to speak to the scientists involved to properly understand that, I suspect there's a reason they've picked 35kWh not 60.
But 35kWh should be enough to do a decent range in a car, if it's capable of handling high kW regeneration from braking and continual harvesting in lift-and-coast, which hopefully something as clever as Nyobolt's battery can. They've said their concept has about an 155 mile range, which is far from rubbish although of course given the designer pedigree involved there's a lot of lightweighting and not-exactly-bog-standard aerodynamics involved to get there. Both of which are good things. It's cool to develop range extension design not just yet another SUV with a drag coefficient of 3.5-6, whack 150kWh of weight in it and call it a day.
Back to the battery, though. The basis for Nyobolt's technology is a 2018 paper that Grey co-authored, which the company itself describes as "seminal" - Niobium tungsten oxides for high-rate lithium-ion energy storage. So far, so Car Science. It's a load of elements and some energy processes loosely arranged into a sentence; well, they're not hydrocarbons but we can still rearrange 'em to make more sense.
Niobium isn't an element that's particularly headline-grabbing. It's used in normal things like hypoallergenic jewellery and steel and/or face mist production and it's actually fairly common, as elements go. About midfield in terms of abundance. Extracting it involves a process called "desliming" which, after a week in a field in La Sarthe, I could go for a bit of.
Where you might have heard of it, unless you happen to work with it, is CBMM Niobium who've sponsored quite a few Formula E events over the years. They're a Brazilian mining company, which figures cus Brazil is one of two countries that produce niobium (the other is Canada) and does by far the lion's share of it worldwide.
Anyway: niobium, it's alright. Nothing madly toxic about it and it doesn't oxidise, it's awkward to mine because it doesn't naturally occur as an individual element but what isn't a bit of a pain in the arse to get out of a hole, etc ho ho ho.
How it works
I'm always kind of torn about how technical to get in Car Science because on the one hand, this is all quite technical isn't it but on the other how boring does this want to be. Just briefly we do have to talk about ionic diffusion, though.
I've been thinking a lot about the way batteries are a mix of chemistry and physics recently, mostly while getting annoyed trying to find a way to say iron and ion differently enough for it to be obvious whether I'm referring to the battery ingredient or the thing that moves around to make it charge.
Lithium gets used as a battery material because it can get to higher energy densities in storage and withstand a lot of charge cycles compared to other chemistries like sodium (so far). The density gets better with things like solid state electrolytes but the ionic diffusion gets worse, which creates a challenge for charging.
It's one of the many reasons solid state remains some way off, despite being a bit of a white whale for battery production. To make big solid state batteries you need efficient, robust solid state electrolytes - what Grey et al's paper and Nyobolt's prototype system use to solve that is using niobium tungsten oxides (Nb16W5O55 and Nb18W16O93) as electrode materials, specifically within the anode. Compared to conventional electrode materials like spinel lithium titanate and lithium manganese oxide, these niobium tungsten oxide electrodes cause greater lithium ion diffusion by magnitudes, which means they can force high density, solid state batteries into fast charging times.
TL;DR fancy metal make lighter battery charge faster
Obviously, that's a 2018 paper and there will have been more research; Nyobolt's systems definitely rest partly on the smart way it charges, using an ECU directly connected to the battery (rather than something onboard the car) to manage its charging cycles. Speaking of which, apparently they've done more than 2000 at this quick charging rate without any decay.
Is this large-scale viable? Not on a like, you'll be seeing it in a cheap car any time soon scale. There's a reason the prototype is in a Lotus Elise not a good old 1993 Renault Twingo. There is a viable product here, though - nothing being used is an off-the-charts impossible-to-replicate nanomaterial in the way some of the carbon coatings for high-speed-charging electrodes at the lab stage are and for high-end, bespoke vehicles this could be a thing in the short term, with technological trickle-down to other systems as its developed.
That's probably enough of that for a woman who's barely capable of forming sentences. By Friday I'll try and get my brain back on the complex materials game.
Hazel
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