Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited (CATL) is hardly a household name to US EV advocates, but that could change if the company’s plans come to fruition. CATL, which was profiled last week by Bloomberg, was founded in 2011 and now sells more cells to EV-makers in China than any other firm. CATL hopes to raise $2… Read more »
Sponsored by Keysight Technologies The DC-DC converter is a key component in hybrid and EV architectures, converting the higher voltage bus (MH – 48 V or EV/HEV – 100s of V) to the traditional 12 V power bus, from where most electrical loads are powered. There is extreme downward cost pressure on design and test, across… Read more »
Ionic Materials has secured $65 million in a Series C financing round from investors in the battery manufacturing, consumer electronic and EV fields, who will be working with the company to speed the development of its solid polymer electrolyte battery material. “This funding round will allow us to add to our talented technical staff while… Read more »
Engine builder Cummins has acquired Johnson Matthey’s UK automotive battery systems business, a subsidiary that specializes in high-voltage battery systems for electric and hybrid vehicles. Cummins and Johnson Matthey also agreed to collaborate on the development of battery materials for commercial heavy-duty applications. Last October, Cummins acquired Brammo, which is known for designing and developing… Read more »
Graphite has long been the default choice of material for anodes, but researchers dream of replacing graphite with silicon, which has ten times the gravimetric energy density. Unfortunately, silicon has several issues that limit its commercial use – it expands during lithiation, causing particles to agglomerate in ways that impede efficiency, and it is not… Read more »
What’s going to happen to all those lithium-ion batteries after they die? What’s the best way to recycle them? A new model developed at the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory allows industry insiders to assess the money and energy savings from recycling EV batteries. ReCell, a closed-loop battery recycling model, offers preliminary estimates of total costs… Read more »
Scania, a member of the Volkswagen Group, and Northvolt, a 2016 startup that is building what it calls a European gigafactory for Li-ion batteries (with a planned 32 GWh annual capacity), have agreed to work together to develop and commercialize battery cell technology for heavy commercial vehicles. Scania will invest €10 million ($12.5 million) in… Read more »
Motor manufacturer YASA, which was spun out from the University of Oxford in 2009, has raised £15 million in a new round of funding, bringing the total raised by the company to £35 million. The company also announced the signing of long-term development and supply agreements with several automotive customers, and the opening of a… Read more »
As lithium-ion batteries proliferate, the question of what to do with them when they wear out is becoming a major environmental concern. Less than five percent of used batteries are recycled today. Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed an energy-efficient recycling process that restores used cathodes from spent batteries and makes… Read more »
An international team of scientists, including researchers from the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, has discovered an anode material that enables super-fast charging and offers stable operation over many thousands of cycles. In a recent article in Nature Communications, Argonne Battery Scientist Jun Lu and colleagues describe a water-bearing compound, lithium titanate hydrate, that could replace… Read more »