EV Battery Life Could Be Significantly Prolonged by Single-Crystal Electrodes

Electric vehicle manufacturers could increase vehicle range significantly by replacing the traditional lithium-ion battery with ‘single-crystal electrode’ batteries. New research has revealed that electric vehicle batteries equipped with single-crystal electrodes could travel for ‘millions of miles’ and potentially outlast other vehicle parts.

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are slated to replace traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles as the world transitions to renewable energy. They are still a work in progress, however, and current EV batteries struggle to compete with the combustion engine in terms of range. As a result, automakers are constantly working to increase EV battery capacity and develop vehicles that can travel great distances on a single charge.

A study published in the Journal of the Electromechanical Society revealed that a lithium-ion battery with a single crystal electrode had 80% of its capacity after 6 years of continuous charging and discharging, lasting eight times longer than an ordinary Li-ion battery during cycling and covering equal to 5 million miles. Electric cars equipped with this new type of battery could use just one battery pack for their entire lifetimes.

Canadian Light Source chemist and study co-author Toby Bond says the researchers’ main focus was to deepen their understanding of how wear and tear causes fatigue and damage to build over time. A statement from the co-author notes that the researchers wanted to figure out a way to stop battery wear and tear and keep them from losing their capacity over time.

Since wear and tear is primarily responsible for the loss of battery capacity, discovering a way to prevent the resultant damage and fatigue would keep EV batteries running at full capacity years after their manufacture. Texas-based EV maker Tesla provided most of the funding for the research and tapped Dalhousie University researchers to conduct the study.

The Nova Scotian scientists compared the more common polycrystalline electrode with the new single-crystal electrode and found that the latter’s single-crystal structure increased its resistance to mechanical strain.

After cycling both electrodes for two and a half years, the researchers found that the polycrystalline electrode was suffused with tiny cracks that reduced its energy capacity while the single-crystal electrode had just a few cracks after a similar period of cycles.

This new electrode also maintained around 80% of its original capacity after over 20,000 cycles of charging and discharging, granting it an estimated 5 million miles in range compared to the 200,000 miles you can get out of a conventional electric vehicle battery.

It would be interesting to see how the commercialization of these long-lasting batteries could impact the cost of EV models from manufacturers like Rivian Automotive Inc. (NASDAQ: RIVN).

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