Week 6 Session 13
1)BATTERY SWAPPING:
Picture this, you are in your brand new swanky EV and cruising down the highway when suddenly, you get an alert saying that your battery capacity is rapidly reaching zero. You search for a plug-in charging station and thankfully, you find one just within the acceptable range of the remaining battery charge. Reaching there you find that there is a long line in front of the charging station and will take an average of 2-hours to charge your battery. Charging an EV takes a long time, a really long time. The only models to buck this trend are the EVs released by Tesla, and only if the cars are connected to the Tesla superchargers.For the EV market to expand rapidly, the time taken to charge batteries will be a huge deterrent.This is the technology that the Government of India has proposed in its annual budget for 2021-22. Battery swapping. A technology in which users can exchange the expended batteries from their vehicles with new fully charged batteries. This technology significantly reduces the charging time while also decreasing the load on the electric grid. Currently, the technology only supports integration in two-wheelers and three-wheelers.
2)LITHIUM SULFUR BATTERY:
The cathode in Lithium-Ion batteries is composed of metal oxides from Lithium, Nickel, Manganese, and Cobalt. Among the three metal oxides, Cobalt accounts for up to 20% of the total weight of the cathode. However, it is mined from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country that allegedly uses practices that are not socially responsible. As EV production increases around the world, the global supply chain of Cobalt has been severely hit. Over the decade, significant progress has been made to reduce the dependence on a metal that is prone to supply shocks. Among all the technologies that are being currently studied, the Sulfur-Lithium battery is the one that is leading the race to replace Lithium-ion batteries as the source of energy storage in the future. In the Lithium-Sulfur battery, the anode is replaced with metallic Lithium while Sulfur serves as the cathode. Discharging the battery produces Lithium-ions that move through the electrolyte. These ions interact with sulfur at the cathode end converting the sulfur into Lithium Polysulphides. This process is reversed while charging.