Toyota Offers Hope Of Cheaper Battery For Electric Cars

[Raistlin]

A Battery that is cheaper and more efficient than those in current use could soon help bring down the cost of electric and hybrid cars.

Researchers at Toyota believe they are on their way to developing a power source that will also improve the range of the vehicles.

The cars currently use lithium-ion batteries. And while they are light and powerful and provide ample acceleration and reasonable range and life, lithium is expensive.

For example the Battery pack of the Nissan Leaf costs around £7,500 - and its range is still limited to around 138 miles; two factors that put many people off buying the vehicles.

Short range: The Nissan Leaf's lithium-ion Battery

But now the engineers at the Japanese car giant say they are making steady progress in developing a battery that uses magnesium instead of lithium, and which could someday offer a cheaper and more energy-dense alternative, reports technologyreview.com.

Earlier this month, researchers at the Toyota Research Institute of North America (TRINA) in Michigan published a paper in the journal Chemical Communications that describes experiments involving a magnesium-ion battery with a new kind of anode, made of tin, and the same type of electrolytes used in lithium-ion batteries.

The tests showed promising performance and open the path for further research, reported Nikhilendra Singh, the lead author of the paper.

'The potential is definitely there,' said Singh. 'There are some improvements we need to make to its performance, which we’ve addressed in the paper as well. But overall, we’re very excited.'

Magnesium is the third most abundant element dissolved in seawater, and so is easily obtainable.

And batteries made from the element should also have a higher storage capacity than lithium-ion ones because magnesium ions have a positive charge of two, rather than one for lithium ions.

Many are out off buying an electric car because of the cost and the limited range per charge - both of which a magnesium-ion battery would help

Thus a magnesium-ion battery would be able to store more charge per gram, and that would translate into a longer driving range in a car or running time for consumer electronics.

However, the current obstacle is that the chemistry involved in making a magnesium-ion battery work efficiently has yet to be perfected.

There are two primary routes of exploration, says Yuyan Shao, a senior scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the piece on technologyreview.com continues.

One is focused on making batteries with a magnesium metal anode - which charges efficiently but is incompatible with conventional electrolytes.

So the search is now on for electrolytes that do work with magnesium.

Another potential solution the say is to use a different type of anode, one that works with familiar, conventional electrolytes.

This approach has also had limited success previously, but Toyota’s paper outlines how the results suggest further research would be worthwhile.