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80% in 8 minutes: New miracle battery made in China
Fast charging time, long range and long service life. Graphene batteries are something like the jack of all trades among batteries. However, the material is also extremely expensive. The Chinese car manufacturer GAC is now promising that it will be ready for series production.
80% in 8 minutes: New miracle battery made in China
It's something like the Achilles heel of e-mobility: electric vehicles have a limited range and then have to be charged. But who wants to spend their valuable time waiting next to a charging station? This is exactly what critics of electric vehicles complain about. This is exactly why plug-in hybrids are often returned after leasing contracts have expired with the charging cable in its original packaging and therefore never used. And that's exactly why engineers around the world are researching new battery systems, the ultimate super battery that not only enables long ranges, but can also be charged in a very short time and may still work long after the rest of the vehicle has been scrapped.
Like so many companies, the Chinese car manufacturer GAC is taking part in this race for the ultimate battery technology and is now trying to get to the top. According to a recent release from the company, its new fast-charging battery is said to have achieved “groundbreaking progress”. It is based on the material graphene, which has high electrical conductivity and is therefore of great interest to battery builders.
Nobel Prize winner
Graphene is the name for a modification of carbon with a two-dimensional structure in which each carbon atom is surrounded by three others at an angle of 120 degrees, forming a honeycomb-shaped pattern. In 2010, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were honored for their studies with the material graphene awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Three years later, the EU decided to fund research into graphene with one billion euros.
German researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have teamed up with the Estonian start-up Skeleton Technologies to develop a graphene battery that is not only smaller and lighter, but also more durable and can even charge in just 15 seconds. In principle, shorter charging times for electric car batteries can already be achieved, but the big drawback so far has been: the faster charging takes place, the faster the lifespan of the battery reduces. The graphene battery's short charging time combined with charging cycles running into the hundreds of thousands is intended to solve three main problems: slow charging times, battery degradation and range anxiety, according to a press release from Skeleton Technologies. However, there is a catch: the production costs are very high. Skeleton itself therefore only sees its invention as a complementary technology, a supplementary technology to lithium-ion batteries.
So far, graphene has actually had one main problem, namely that it is very expensive - up to a few hundred dollars per gram. That's why some manufacturers sometimes focus on alternative technologies. Here too, Chinese companies have an important say. The KFZ Wirtschaft recently reported that the Chinese car manufacturer NIO presented the first electric car with a Solid state battery is equipped.
GAC is now said to have succeeded in making a graphene battery ready for series production. The problem of high costs was allegedly solved with the help of a new 3DG (three-dimensional graphene) production technology. This is said to have reduced production costs to a tenth.
The electric vehicle industry is particularly interested in the graphene-based super-fast charging battery. This graphene-based battery has 6C fast charging capability and can be charged to 80% capacity within 8 minutes when combined with a 600A high-capacity charger. This battery technology not only shortens the charging time significantly, it should also significantly extend the battery life.
Brand launch in September
“Pleasingly, battery technology has now made its way from the laboratory into real production,” says the GAC Group’s statement. The graphene-based super fast charging battery is now in the phase of actual vehicle testing. Aion V, the first vehicle equipped with the battery, is scheduled to be mass produced from September this year.
This makes GAC the first company to announce a specific date for market readiness. However, the manufacturer did not reveal any further details such as information about the energy content or how the charging test took place. Size and weight – energy density is an important factor in graphene-based batteries – were also not mentioned.
By the way, graphene-based batteries are - of course - also a hot potato for smartphones: the US company Real Graphene, for example, wants to have brought a new battery technology based on them to market maturity. The prototype is a 3,000 mAh battery that is supposed to be fully charged within 20 minutes using a 60 watt adapter without getting hot. The latter could increase the safety of the device during fast charging and also extend the life of the battery. According to the company, the battery can go through 1,500 charging cycles before losing capacity. According to experts, standard smartphone batteries only provide 80 percent of their original performance after around 400 charging cycles.