Are Tesla’s batteries adult to snuff? It’s this Canadian startup’s pursuit to check
The destiny of lithium-ion battery longevity — a pivotal member in a universe but hoary fuels — competence distortion in an unassuming, bunker-style building in a Halifax-area industrial park.
Down a petrify hall, past a ping pong table, is an aeroplane hangar-like room with mountainous ceilings, whirring electronic apparatus and a large loading doorway flung open to a gulf air.
This is a bureau of Novonix Battery Testing Services, a Dartmouth association honing high-precision battery contrast systems for tech firms like Apple and Tesla Motors.
The start-up was spun off from Herzberg Medal-winner Jeff Dahn’s ground-breaking battery lab during Dalhousie University. Australia’s publicly traded Novonix Group bought a infancy interest in June, and a association is now ramping adult efforts to grow a patron base.
Hard to make long-lasting battery
With a assistance of a $500,000 loan from a Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency announced Tuesday, Novonix skeleton to pierce to a incomparable facility, supplement to a eight-person group and enhance apparatus sales and contrast services.
Demand for high-powered, long-lasting lithium-ion batteries is approaching to soar as restrictions on gasoline- and diesel-fuelled cars mountain and renewable energy-storage needs increase. Testing and lengthening a life outlook of a rechargeable batteries will turn an increasingly vicious member to investigate and development.
In what could be a hulk step for a firm’s lithium-ion battery contrast capabilities, Dahn — who has teamed adult with Tesla, a California electric automobile and solar row association headed by CEO Elon Musk — has also reserved a new obvious to Novonix.
“It’s really tough to make a lithium-ion dungeon that lasts a prolonged time,” says Dr. Chris Burns, Novonix boss and CEO. “It’s even harder to infer it.”
Lithium-ion record ubiquitousÂ
The absolute rechargeable batteries fuel all from dungeon phones and laptops to vacuums and electric vehicles. They’re even being used in grid-energy storage projects.
Testing and lengthening a life outlook of rechargeable batteries will turn an increasingly vicious member to investigate and development. (Shutterstock)
Traditional methods of contrast a lifetime of a lithium-ion battery can take months or even years. But Novonix has narrowed down a contrast duration to weeks.
“We grown and commercialized a complement that is some-more accurate than what anyone else is building in a marketplace and that authorised researchers to benefit discernment into a opening of their batteries in usually a few weeks what by normal methods competence take months or years,” Burns says.
The 30-year-old, creatively from outward Boston, came to Halifax in 2009 to attend Dalhousie University.
Largely by word-of-mouth, Novonix now has amassed an considerable register of marquee clients including Panasonic, Dyson, Bosch and 3M.
“We go to conferences and trade shows and Jeff Dahn mentions us,” Burns says. “It’s a tiny attention and people hear about us and that has kept us really busy.”
Keeping it local
Using high-tech electronics, Novonix measures coulombic potency to establish how tiny changes in rechargeable lithium-ion battery chemistry will impact long-term battery performance.
The association uses internal suppliers to build a equipment. The steel work comes from Protocase in Cape Breton while a house public is finished by Sunsel Systems in Dartmouth.
Dr. Jeff Dahn from Dalhousie University won a Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Enginering for his work on rechargeable batteries. (Martin Lipman / NSERC)
Novonix skeleton to enhance a apparatus charity shortly to embody a latest egghead skill to come out of Dahn’s lab.
Although estimating a remaining life in a lithium-ion battery is difficult, Dahn says he beheld that as lithium-ion batteries age, a glass electrolyte in a cells solemnly turns into a plain form.
“When a glass is gone, a batteries are dead,” he says. “So if we can establish a fragment of glass that stays in a battery, we can guess a state of health of a battery and how most longer it competence last.”
With a assistance of a tyro researcher, Dahn grown a supposed “lithium-ion battery differential thermal analyzer.”
“It’s a outrageous mouthful,” he said. “But it’s indeed a really elementary method. Batteries are solidified and solemnly exhilarated to detect when a glass electrolyte melts. The strength of a vigilance is associated to how most glass is remaining and to a composition.”
Article source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/novonix-battery-nova-scotia-start-up-funding-1.4267609?cmp=rss