Since its birth, the electric car has had to overcome all kinds of obstacles: price, weight, autonomy, recharging infrastructure, etc. In most fields, progress is being made in the right direction, but progress is slow. In few of them there seems to be something that could represent a radical advance, will it be NASA’s graphene battery?
The American organization has been working on this project for some time, which aims to create a solid-state battery that uses graphene and will be much more powerful, lighter and safer than the current ones. It seems that they have found the key, we are going to analyze what it consists of and what it means for the automotive world.
What is NASA’s graphene battery?
SABERS (for the English “Solid State Architecture Battery Unit for Greater Recharging and Safety”) is the name of this project, which was originally conceived to improve current batteries, which present certain problems such as their high weight, their degradation with recharge cycles or its flammability.
Regarding the first, it presents a much simpler design, in the form of a bipolar battery, with packed cells and a layer-on-layer design. This makes it much more difficult for them to be damaged.
As for the second, a key aspect to achieve this is that they do not have any liquid that overheats and can catch fire, they are completely solid. Also, when they do work, they operate at a lower temperature, no more than 150 degrees, which helps to this end, and, since they do not need as much cooling, they are more compact and lighter.
The key to this new type of battery is in its structure:
- An anode made of lithium metal
- A cathode of sulfur and selenium organized around a graphene mesh
- An intermediate electrolyte in the completely solid state
Ok, but what does this mean? In short, it makes it possible to reduce the weight of the battery and increase its energy density, that is, lighter batteries that supply a greater amount of electricity.
In the words of Rocco Viggiano, chief investigator of the SABERS research department: “Not only does this design eliminate 30 to 40 percent of the weight of the battery, but it also allows us to double or even triple the energy it can store, far exceeding the capabilities of current lithium-ion batteries.”
What does this advance mean for the automotive world?
The development of NASA is focused on aviation and the development has reached a point where they consider it feasible to use this type of batteries for planes that carry out medium-distance flights.
For all of the above, it is a novelty that can considerably improve the state of electric cars in two ways: greatly lighten their weight and ensure that they have enormous autonomy.
Given the higher energy density of these batteries, the first approach would involve installing batteries with a much smaller size and weight, which would take up less space in vehicles (freeing up space for, for example, more charging) and would make them lighter, so its energy consumption would also be lower.
The second would be to maintain batteries of the same size as the current ones but which, thanks to that storage capacity two and up to three times larger, would allow zero-emission vehicles to triple their range of action.
But is it an immediate solution?
Not a priori. It is not the first time that work has been done in this field, but those who came before NASA found obstacles that led them to believe that, at least for the next decade, current lithium-ion batteries will continue to be the protagonists.
However, NASA’s announcement also suggests that they may be further along than expected and may come to fruition sooner than expected.