Batteries: Improve or Diehard

If ever there was a job for me, it was as an "environmental tester" at a company where I used to work. I watched with envy as the lab technicians baked computers in an oven, submerged them in water, dropped them from a height of 6 feet--and then plug 'em in and power 'em up to see if they still worked.

Alas, they never let me transfer into that group. Some silliness about my destructive urges being a little scary. But now I've learned that Sandia National Labs have a similiar--albeit more specialized--testing group. The Power Sources R&D group gets to spend their day driving nails into lithium-ion batteries, heating them to extreme temperatures, overcharging them, and generally wreaking havoc to see how much abuse they can take before they blow up.

"Lithium-ion batteries, generally found in laptop computers and power tools, have greatly improved over the past few years," says researcher Peter Roth. Gee, I'd hope so. "Improve or Diehard" might be a good motto for the group.

Actually, the goal of the Power Sources R&D group has little to do with laptop batteries and everything to do with battery-powered vehicles. Specifically, Roth and his team are working on the FreedomCAR program, which is investigating lithium-ion batteries to be part of hybrid electric-gasoline and plug-in hybrid powered vehicles.

Current hybrid vehicles run on gasoline and use nickel-metal hydride batteries as the energy storage device for the electric motor. The battery part of the FreedomCAR program focuses on safe lithium-ion batteries that have six times the energy density of lead-acid batteries and two to three times the energy density of nickel-metal hydride batteries. According to Roth, newer lithium/iron phosphate batteries are extremely resilient and less reactive than other types when subjected to extreme conditions.

"Extreme conditions." That's where I'd like to come in.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 04:33 PM  Permalink