Battery of fresh ideas

Modern technologies in batteries for electric vehicles

One of the key components of electric vehicles is the battery. This is a rather complex device, the main element of which are cells. They are not produced in Belarus due to the lack of minerals. However, the National Academy of Sciences and the leading enterprises of the country’s engineering industry are developing numerous technical and technological solutions in batteries for electric vehicles.

Craving for electricity

Speaking about the creation of batteries based on domestic production, the spokesperson for the Belarusian Industry Ministry Oleg Slepchenko noted that this is a rather complex device with huge requirements, “Cells are main elements of the battery. They are not produced in Belarus, because we do not have the necessary mineral resources. Most of these products are made in China. For example, Belkommunmash mostly redirected its production in the construction of batteries. The plant purchases cells from different manufacturers and makes batteries based on them.”
Now our scientists are working on creating skill sets in lithium-ion batteries. They may not be cheap, but they have a good capacity. The scope of their use is constantly expanding. They are used not only in electric transport, but also in the electric power industry, on hoisting machines, in telecommunications systems, in solar systems, in railway transport and wherever energy is required to be stored for later use. “Ninety-nine percent of electric vehicles use lithium-ion batteries today. In fact, lithium batteries have revolutionised electrical engineering, rapidly replacing lead-acid batteries. Their main advantages are specific gravity and resource. The amount of stored energy in a lithium battery is three to four times higher than in a lead battery. Their efficiency is also much higher, their service life is two to three times longer, they do not emit aggressive acid fumes and have no memory effect. The latter factor is very important, since new technologies allow us to recharge a partially discharged battery without any damage to it any number of times. The tightness of lithium-ion batteries is a guarantee of their safety in food, chemical industries, as well as in fire hazardous industries,” says Alexander Belevich, Head of the R&D centre Electromechanical and Hybrid Power Units of Mobile Machines of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. “Lithium is a rare earth metal. There is very little of it on the planet. There is no lithium in Belarus at all, so it is not economically feasible to bring ore here to create our own production. Our electric vehicle manufacturers buy cells in China and assemble batteries here. This is the strategy followed by automakers around the world. The cost of the cells is 50-70 percent of the cost of the battery. Our task is to localise the remaining 30 percent in Belarus. When you make a battery yourself, you control all the processes that take place in it, and, most importantly, after removing it from the vehicle, you can sort it out, process it and use it in stationary drives. Everyone understands that lithium-ion batteries are not the best solution in terms of cost and reliability. The engineers are working on it. As soon as there is something new, there will be a rapid transition, because all other technologies will already be ready for this. The task of our scientists is to develop skill sets in this direction and prepare the basis for such a transition,” admits Alexander Belevich. Perhaps graphene will be this new material. Scientists of the Academy of Sciences are already developing graphene batteries. So far, they are inferior in efficiency to lithium-ion ones, but they relieve the manufacturer from the need to purchase lithium in China. In addition, graphene batteries are cheaper. Among other advantages, graphene is an environmentally friendly material, which makes it attractive for use in the creation of electric vehicles.

Aboard!

Modern lithium-ion batteries for electric forklifts and electric carts were created by the Joint Institute of Mechanical Engineering of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus and the Amkodor-Radian public unitary enterprise. The operation of such a forklift will pay back the cost of purchasing a lithium-ion battery in 2.5 years, saving the owner over seven thousand rubles only on reducing power consumption during this time. And after that, the battery life will still be far from being used up. The rest will be about 1000-2000 charge-discharge cycles.


New enterprises and logistics centres immediately focus on the use of forklifts powered by lithium-ion batteries, which could pay back throughout the entire life cycle, unlike lead-acid ones. When developing batteries for Amkodor equipment, innovative materials produced in Belarus were used. New batteries are equipped with a touch screen, which displays information about the technical parameters of the cell. In addition, the batteries are equipped with a programme control system. Using AC technology, it increases the productivity and speed of electric trucks by an average of 20 percent compared to standard models, increases battery power efficiency by 10 percent, and at the same time reduces maintenance costs to a minimum. 

In full swing

Green technologies are good, but electric car batteries may one day become a new environmental concern. It is necessary to put their disposal and processing on stream, because the spent batteries will one day have nowhere to go. We need not just recycling, but complete recycling. To do this, we have to disassemble thousands of batteries daily. However, each automaker puts unique batteries on their cars that differ in structure from others. While there is no single standard, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of batteries will have to be disassembled manually. That is slow and inefficient.
Alexander Belevich believes that there really is a problem, but it is not as global as it could seem, “When a battery’s retention capacity drops to 80 percent, it can no longer be used in an electric vehicle. But it can be given a second life, for example, by using it as a stationary storage device for servicing electric networks, as a spare battery for an electric car, or for solar and wind farms. Nonetheless, sooner or later, the battery will still completely exhaust its resource, it will have to be disposed of. Technologies for recycling electric vehicle batteries and isolating rare earth metals already exist. For instance, there is a plant that recycles accumulators and batteries in Russia. Its capacity is such that in one month it manages to process everything that was brought to it for recycling from all over the country in a year! Work on the creation of technologies for processing lithium-ion batteries is also underway in Belarus. So far, we do not have such a quantity of ‘dead’ batteries in our country that it would be economically feasible to build a separate plant for their processing. However, the situation will change in 10 years. Therefore, our task now is to develop strategy in order to effectively organise the work of our own lithium battery processing plant in the future, if necessary.” 

By Inna Gorbatenko
Photos by Vitaly Pivovarchik, Anton Stepanishchev, Aleksey Stolyarov