Air-breathing batteries
could fuel electric cars
Posted October 13, 2011
Step on a Tesla Roadster’s accelerator, and “your head snaps back,” says Winfried Wilcke, electric-car enthusiast, pilot and Nanoscale Science and Technology Program director at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. With the near-instantaneous torque electric motors deliver, “it’s like a jet when you push the throttles forward – you are pushed hard against the seat,” he says from his office in the hills above San Jose, Calif.
Yet Wilcke hasn’t bought an electric car. A model like the Nissan Leaf won’t work for him. “I have a long commute, so it would run out of steam” he says of its 100-mile range. The Tesla boasts a 245-mile range, but it’s pricey and “is a little bit too small, although I’m still sorely tempted to get one.”
Wilcke exemplifies the conundrum manufacturers will have to overcome for Americans to adopt all-electric vehicles: The least expensive ones don’t go far enough to eliminate “range anxiety.” Models that go farther are too expensive or too small for most consumers.
These vehicles use lithium-ion batteries similar to those in laptop computers and cell phones. They hold far more energy for their weight than batteries of the past, but “they’re not going to enable us to have the kind of mobility that a tankful of gas gives us,” says Jack Wells, director of science at the National Center for Computational Science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). There’s a need, he says, “for something beyond lithium-ion. That’s opening up interesting science questions, many of which are fundamental.”
Wells leads a collaboration with IBM to help find the El Dorado of electric autos: a battery that’s light but packs enough power to take a car up to 500 miles without recharging. They’re armed with a grant of 25 million processor hours on Department of Energy (DOE) supercomputers from the INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) program, administered by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research.
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