Writing in the journal Joule on Wednesday, researchers at Pennsylvania State University said that such a speedy charge rate needed a battery to speedily take in 400 kilowatts of energy. Current-generation vehicles aren't capable of this feat because it risks the lithium plating, the formation of metallic lithium around the anode, which would severely deteriorate battery life.

 

To find the way this constraint, the researchers raised the temperature of their experimental battery to 60 degrees Celsius (140 Fahrenheit) during the charge cycle, then dropped it back down as it was used. What this does is “limit the battery’s exposure to the elevated charge temperature, thus generating a very long cycle life,” said senior author Chao-Yang Wang, a mechanical engineer at The Pennsylvania State University.

 

But scaling up the design and bringing it to market might possibly take a decade, said Rick Sachleben, an affiliate of the American Chemical Society. Makers will need to make sure that instantly raising the temperature is safe and stable, and doesn’t lead to explosions given the phenomenal amount of energy that is being transferred.

 

“Fast charging is one of the holy grails of electric vehicles,” he said. “It’s one of the things that is necessary for them to compete with petroleum-fueled internal combustion engines.”

 

The existing generation of Tesla vehicles need around 30 minutes for a partial charge. One of the inventors of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries who was granted a Nobel Prize in chemistry in October, M. Stanley Whittingham, says ongoing research will continue to make the batteries cheaper, safer and with greater energy density. Further improvements to the technology might also prop up efforts to fight climate change by enabling greater use of renewable-energy sources, Whittingham said.

 

He said Lithium-ion batteries will continue to influence in smart phones and electric vehicles for at least the next 10 years, “because there is nothing really on the horizon,” though Toyota Motor Corp. and American companies are improving solid-state batteries. It’s not clear yet whether you will get a decent amount of power” from such batteries, he added. “They may work for things such as iPhones initially, but there are some big questions before they are used in larger-scale systems.

 

Still, Whittingham said, if you look at the sellers of electricity, they do not particularly want them to be charged very fast.”

 

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