Carmakers want to ditch battery packs, use auto bodies for energy storage
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
>“He’s essentially doing something that we did 10 years ago,” says Emile Greenhalgh, a materials scientist at Imperial College London
Doing something under research conditions and doing it in a mass-produced commercial product are separate accomplishments. Both are important and impressive and should be celebrated.
To add to that, in a domain with life or death consequences.
Also, having the heavy battery down below axle height makes for a nice low center of gravity, making the vehicle much more stable.
[1] http://sikes-elec.com/Resistive-load-bank-450VDC-750VDC-100K...
These batteries would be much more useful for electric bikes/mopeds/motorcycles as they don’t have the same safety complications cars do.
A 50hp engine[1] needs ~37kW which at 5 volts, that is 7,500 amps of current, which requires comically large bus bars (~200x10mm) and conversion electronics. Even at 48 volts[2], you still need ~780 amps, which still requires very large conductors.
At 400 volts, for the same motor, the wiring only needs to be sized for 100 amps, which is reasonably practical (think wire found on welders).
[1]: Let assume that 50hp is the max required steady state output for a motor in a passenger car, and lets ignore any peak/dynamic loads and HVAC as this is napkin engineering
[2]: 48v is generally accepted as the highest voltage before you really need to know what you are doing, though at these power levels, you still should know what you are doing as things like to weld, melt, become bad motors and/or explode.
What else is in production, or at least in prototype?
Shorting a big capacitor is really scary. All the energy comes out at once, in milliseconds. This usually results in an explosion.
Doesn't matter what kind of battery it is though, once you start cutting through them you are very likely to short the electrodes together. Which usually ends in fires.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2020/10/13/energy-rena...
Not every researcher is like that, but it's a problem. The researchers I worked with, also, unfortunately, had this idea that engineering is somehow beneath science. That's just worrying about the details. They think that the idea itself is the real advancement. They think of themselves as smarter and more important than engineers, and they don't like when engineers press them on how they would actually implement their ideas into something real.
Sorry if I sound cynical, it's because I am.
Science, in its current institutionalized form, is starting to look pretty broken to me. It's time for something new.
* A top BSc candidate with a comp eco background would need to forgo ~800k in compensation for a 4 year PhD. While in grad school, they must be able to survive on ~20k per year in direct income. Fresh from a BS they may have 100k in student debt, or have been fortunate to have wealthy family or studied internationally where the cost of education is lower. People willing and able to go for grad school do not represent an unbiased sample of the top students.
Consider the SR-71: Is it the pilots, the crews, the administrators who secure funding, the voters, the integrating engineers, the test pilots, the supply chain, the metallurgists, the engine designers, the manufacturers of test equipment, the standards bureau, the aircraft architect, the people who specified the initial requirements, the tire manufacturers, the refueling crews, the avionics manufacturers, the chemical suppliers for the bespoke starting fuel, the aerospace engineers who did the fundamental research, Chuck Yeager, the Wright Brothers, Bernoulli, the thousands of spouses who sacrificed to support their partners, or the fundamental researchers who ascertained the physics necessary to make the aircraft fly and evade detection?
Every one of them, and more, can lay claim to the statement: If we hadn't done what we did, the SR-71 wouldn't have flown.
I'm a fundamental physicist who has spent the entirety of this century trying to get at the bottom of things because it is the foundation upon which our understanding rests. When we make a measurement, however, even those experiments rest upon work and resources provided by a vast array of engineers, suppliers, manufacturers, administrators, support staff, physical plant, custodial support, funding agencies, and taxpayers.
> The second operational aircraft[40] designed around a stealth aircraft shape and materials, after the Lockheed A-12,[40] the SR-71 had several features designed to reduce its radar signature. The SR-71 had a radar cross-section (RCS) around 110 sq ft (10 m2).[41] Drawing on early studies in radar stealth technology, which indicated that a shape with flattened, tapering sides would reflect most energy away from a radar beam's place of origin, engineers added chines and canted the vertical control surfaces inward. Special radar-absorbing materials were incorporated into sawtooth-shaped sections of the aircraft's skin. Cesium-based fuel additives were used to somewhat reduce exhaust plumes visibility to radar, although exhaust streams remained quite apparent. Kelly Johnson later conceded that Soviet radar technology advanced faster than the stealth technology employed against it.[42]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird#Shape...
Oh god, I never thought about all the awful additives militaries must add to their fuels and lubricants and other industrial chemicals.
> the aircraft architect
because that's the guy who really built it. He could not have done it alone or without the help of everyone you mentioned, but let's not pretend like everyone was equally important here.
As a tangent, this is one of my favorite books detailing the creation of some of Skunkworks' projects, including the SR-71:
https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/...
Except that's completely wrong. An architect did not build the SR-71. Physical engineering involves a feedback cycle and iterative design refinements, just like software engineering.
I don't think it's common from some architect to just draw a blueprint, hand it off to some people to build it, and that's it, we're done here, my design came to life thanks to my Godly design skills (and the simple work of 40 lowly engineers). The SR-71 is a project that took years and years of work, lots of failed attempts, experiments and lessons learned. There's no way that the majority of the credit for the SR-71 goes to some bossman architect dude who just told people what to do. It was very much teamwork. Everyone, including the test pilots, participated in its design and refinement.
Likewise, it takes thousands of engineers to operate Google right now. But do you really think most of those engineers are irreplaceable? Meanwhile good luck finding replacements for Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemewat.
This notion that everybody is equally talented/important is absurd. And the idea that you can always make up for a lack of talent with hard work is pretty obviously debunked if you take even a passing glance at competitive sports.
I'm not saying a single person can do everything without help. I'm saying a single person can have talent that you could never hope to have, no matter how hard you try, and that's just the way it is. And because of that talent, those people are more important when it comes to getting shit done.
You can also have asshole superstar who just needs other people for dumb labor. And who can micromanage them to project success.
That is pretty obviously only a local optimum.
Point to the mind, and suddenly everyone is equal.
Not equal. Sufficient.
Athletics are entertainment. Entertainers are usually not fungible. Contrast that with jobs demanding physical work.
Denying that some people are more replaceable than others for a given task done to a certain tolerance is a significant self kneecap. It blinds you to power structures and leverage dynamics. It also makes several simplifying paradigms inaccessible.
Are you able to reference any material which explorer these concepts more in depth? These are incredibly resonating ideas.
Slightly more fun, but still based on serious research: The Dictator’s Handbook [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_holes
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook
I think that EE has always been more connected to industry.
The research world, just like every other social circle, is full of people who are just parroting each other, repeating to each other what everyone already believes, and patting themselves on the back. Maybe, once in a while, one person takes a risk, gets a cool result, and then 100 others rehash the same idea with small variations. At some point, the field collectively decides what the next cool research meme is going to be, and everybody follows along.
So yeah, structural battery packs stopped being cool at some point, I guess. Except that battery tech 10 years ago wasn't the same as what we have today, so maybe the results don't directly transfer. The topic hasn't been studied in a contemporary context, maybe the old results are out of date, maybe they would really be worth investigating again... But who cares, that topic has been done, it isn't cool anymore, it was 10 years ago. All the cool kids are doing solid state batteries nowadays.
I'd be curious to know what your experience is that leads you to this opinion.
A more charitable explanation would be that game changing discoveries are by their nature rare, and even when they do arrive, they only outline a new space for exploration, which means that by definition, most research is going to be filling the gaps in that new space, both for positive results, and the depressingly large chunk of work that is discovering what doesn't work. The results of this negative outcome often look the same.
The requirements to work on core principles that might have an application (and fund&organize that work) are fundamentally different from finding product/market fit for something that's known to be possible and are fundamentally different from optimizing a process for making that thing 1% cheaper than last year, so those are generally done by different institutions and different people.
So yes, from the point of someone doing fundamental research, once a proof of concept exists, their part of the work is done - there's a lot of further steps to get that to a commercially viable product, but those steps should be done by someone else who's better at it and whose organization is structured completely differently to facilitate this completely different process. And meanwhile they'll working on some other tech that's ready for that engineering stage yet. Theoretical physics isn't applied physics isn't prototype engineering isn't process optimization engineering.
You need people and organizations working on every TRL step, and they aren't interchangeable, you need the preceding step well-funded to make your work possible and you need to move the results to the following steps since those will harvest the actual end-user value in the end.
Solar, although to be fair I'm looking at "is financially worth producing" as I'm sure they technically could be mass-produced in the 1960s if they could somehow find a buyer.
Integrating battery packs anywhere else in the body of the car seems much less practical. These car batteries aren't like notebook batteries: they have dedicated heating and cooling systems in addition to high current connectors, fire proof casings, emergency shutoffs etc. You can't just pepper those around the car.
I can't even imagine the maintenance or repair considerations of a pack that's embedded inside of the frame or a monocoque chassis.
Lastly this isn't even an Ars article, it's from Wired. It really is a terrible click-bait headline. The article, imho isn't much better.
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/10/10/teslas-new-structural-b... (Tesla’s New Structural Battery Pack — It’s Not Cell-to-Pack, It’s Cell-to-Body)
What OP's link is describing, is where the battery cells literally are the vehicle trunk - as in they're built into the walls, instead of being contained between two walls.
It's terrible for repairability, and with regards to power sources... safety.
This is a bunch of researchers solving the wrong optimization problem. You'll likely see it in Formula E, but under no circumstances should it be in production, mass-produced cars.
Gizmodo stylee
Yes they do. The first paragraph of this article discusses Elon Musk talking about integrating this into Teslas.
You don't need to pay ~$7k. That's about the full price of a new battery. The battery isn't dead, it just has a lower rating (likely over 80%). Even if that's absolutely unacceptable, it can be used to A) replace batteries that have hit 60% or some other lower standard for people who don't care about range as much, or B) act as a stationary battery.
Considering that cars are currently driven an average of "13 500 miles per year" according to US stats, 8 years is a little over 100k miles. Tesla has already hit the "million kilometre battery" mark (so at least two thirds toward the "million mile battery"), so it's kind of absurd to say you'd have any serious need to replace it 1/6th through its spec lifetime.
And now for a BONUS: in 8 years the price of batteries will drop, due to economies of scale if nothing else. So the replacement will be cheaper than your current battery was (hah, implying we all have EV batteries).
Sorry, but it sounds like you're quibbling over whether this is $7k or $5k with trade-in value. That doesn't address the substance of my comment.
https://www.google.ca/maps/place/NH-101A,+Milford,+NH,+USA/@...
US 101 & CA 92 and US 101 & CA 85 are plausible intersections if OP wrote a typo.
Now, most vehicles don't have ladder frames. If you want to drill a hole for attaching a bolt, for example to add a tow hook, you probably need to first weld on a 1/4" plate. A body shop can't just un-bolt a rocker panel damaged in an accident and put on new ones, both rocker panels are one big piece that forms part of the structure of the vehicle and everything else is connected to them. You cut and weld to repair the damage, or bend it back into place. In race vehicles and motorcycles, this concept is extended to the engine itself: The block is a structural member of the vehicle.
Practice will adjust to progress. It won't always be as easy to repair as it once was. We can only hope that the safety and energy improvements are worth the complexity and functionality.
Ladder frame can crumple just fine. It's a prerequisite technology for airbags.
They get wet.
Gasoline doesn't come with its own ignition source (and a drill bit isn't usually enough to provide one) whereas puncturing battery packs starts the chemical reaction that quickly results in fire.
From experience, the eye flush is terrifying wondering if you'll be able to see again for about 10 minutes.
Compared to current battery-in-a-box construction methods, I expect that for crash safety the embedded battery may actually give more structural rigidity, and more freedom to incorporate crumple zones on tactical places.
In some other generation of battery tech, there’s plenty of gray area here that still provides benefit. A stiffer battery requires less housing. A stiff enough battery only requires shielding against punctures. Stronger still, and you can bolt it between two frame elements and have it function like a cross brace, while still being able to remove it for servicing.
It would be a neat triple play to have the sails be solar panels and the batteries, too.
This benefits the Car manufacturers of course, since Self-driving cars will almost certainly require a 'Subscription' plan
But that wasn't what OP was talking about.
It was mostly extremely bad press that gave it a bad look.
The metal encasing around the battery should protect against a battery explosion. I'm sure there are solutions, like encasing it in foam for example to prevent oxygen getting in.
One thing tanks used to do to prevent ammo from cooking off was store them in storage racks surrounded by water.
i wonder if it also reduces the possibility (or increases the cost) of recycling used battery packs by 80%.
... starting with this article which gives credence to these Asp and Greenhalgh fellows, who have deemed the current situation with batteries as a "structural parasite" while at the same time proposing to incorporate them into the skin of the vehicle, which moves mass way upwards and way outwards-- both of the no-nos in regards to stability. The negative effects from just the shifting of mass will likely outweigh any of the gains using their method, which so far seem to be a bit nebulous. And that's ignoring many of the obvious safety, reparability, and complexity concerns...
The military name for this is ‘reactive armor’. Imagine backing into a quarter panel in a parking lot - Boom!
This is stupid on multiple levels.