Novel Lithium-Ion Battery Resistant to Extreme Temperatures Allows Electric Cars to Travel Longer on Single Charge

Temperature is a critical factor for batteries, especially lithium-ion batteries. Extreme temperature changes could spell a decrease in capacity and performance for batteries which is especially detrimental for electric cars. Today, a new temperature-resilient battery unveiled by scientists could mean that electric vehicles can travel longer on a single charge despite extreme cold or heat.

Temperature Versus Battery Operation

Researchers from the University of California San Diego have unveiled a novel lithium-ion battery that performs admirably at freezing cold or scorching hot temperatures. The team used a special temperature-proof electrolyte, the substance in batteries that allows electric currents to flow. Introducing electric vehicle production can theoretically allow the vehicles to drive farther on a single charge despite cold climates, reports DailyMail.

Today, erratic or extreme hotness or coldness can adversely affect the performance of batteries, especially those in elect vehicles, such as by slowing charging speeds and reducing the distance that can be traveled by the vehicles before needing to the recharged.

Range anxiety describes a driver's fear of running out of battery charge before arriving at another charging station or their final destination. This phenomenon has been a barrier to the mass adoption of environmentally-friendly vehicles.

Professor Zheng Chen from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering explains that high-temperature operation in areas with ambient temperatures can reach triple digits, and the road has hotter temperatures. Electric vehicles often have battery packs under the floor, near the hot roads. Likewise, batteries warm up just from having a flowing current during their operation. If the batteries cannot tolerate the warm-up at high temperatures, their performance is known to degrade quickly.

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Temperature-Resilient Lithium Batteries: The Future of Electric Vehicles

In tests conducted by researchers, the proof-of-concept batteries retained roughly 87.5% and 115.9% of their energy capacity at temperatures of -40 and 50 degrees Celsius, respectively. This means the batteries can undergo charge and discharge cycles at an extended rate before they stop functioning.

The batteries developed by Chen and colleagues at the university to be published in the journal PNAS, titled "Solvent selection criteria for temperature-resilient lithium-sulfur batteries," are developed to withstand both extreme cold and heat thanks to their electrolyte. The battery is made of a liquid solution, dibutyl ether, mixed with a lithium salt. A special feature of the liquid solution is that its molecules bind weakly to the lithium ions present in the salt, reports EurekAlert.

In other words, the electrolyte molecules of the recently developed batteries can easily let go of lithium ions as the battery is used. These weak molecular interactions between molecules had previously been discovered in a different study and were seen to improve the performance of batteries at sub-zero temperatures. Additionally, the liquid solution can easily take the heat because it stays in a liquid state at high temperatures, with a boiling point of 141 degrees Celsius.