Stuart Nathan

Tesla research partner claims “million-mile battery” result

News

New lithium ion battery chemistry should be able to power vehicles for over a million miles, while losing less than 10 per cent of its energy capacity, state Canadian electrochemical researchers

The researchers, from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, are led by Jeffrey Dahn, who has an exclusive agreement with Tesla and is listed as the inventor on a recent patent the company has filed on new lithium battery technology. In a paper published in the Journal of the Electrochemical  Society, Dahn and his team report a range of testing results on new batteries which, they state, can be used as benchmarks for other researchers looking into similar technologies.

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The innovative part of the Dahn team’s battery is the cathode. Different types of battery have used various lithium compounds to achieve good characteristics, and Dahn has been investigating a material known as NMC – this is lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide, a material that has been used by many electric vehicle manufacturers including Nissan and Chevrolet, but not Tesla in the past. For the anode, Dahn uses synthetic graphite, and the electrolyte was a blend of lithium salts with other ionic compounds.

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