E-Mobility Engineering 015 l EMotive Scarab off-road truck dossier l In Conversation: Giulio Ornella l Hall effect and magnetic sensors focus l Challenge of batteries for heavy-duty EVs l Alpha Motor Corporation digest l Automated charging insight l HVAC systems focus

Going large offers longer range Nanotech boost for FC catalysts Advanced Cell Engineering (ACE) has filed a patent application for a very large format (VLF) battery cell (writes Nick Flaherty). The filing, in the US, is part of ACE’s Project Magnus to develop a highly efficient, 1 m cell-to-pack prismatic cell. It is the company’s fourth patent application in the past 6 months. Rather than using thousands of small cylindrical cells assembled into a number of modules, which are in turn assembled into a battery pack, a VLF pack would eliminate the need for the module structure by installing 80 to 100 of the cells directly into a vehicle chassis. ACE expects the cell design to be available for licensing early next year. The higher spatial efficiency of the VLF cell, when coupled with ACE’s patented lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry, will enable EV manufacturers A research team in Korea has synthesised metal nanoparticles that can drastically improve the performance of hydrogen fuel cell catalysts (writes Nick Flaherty). The advantage of the technique, developed by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), is that the nanoparticles are produced by a physical method that uses the same sputtering technology for semiconductor manufacturing to deposit thin metal films. The sputtering process uses a plasma to cut large metals into nanoparticles, which are then deposited on a substrate to form a thin film. The research team prepared nanoparticles using a special substrate that prevented the transformation of to build vehicles offering greater range. ACE’s LFP cells offer much higher energy density in any cell format than existing LFP designs. “Current LFP technology has an energy density of about 160 Wh/kg, while our patented Advanced LFP the metal nanoparticles into a thin film by using physical vapour deposition (PVD) rather than chemical reactions. This allows metal nanoparticles to be synthesised, overcoming the challenges of existing chemical synthesis methods. The existing chemical methods limited the types of metals that could be used as nanoparticles, and the synthesis conditions must be changed depending on the type of metal. If this PVD approach is applied simultaneously to two or more metals, alloy nanoparticles of various compositions can be synthesised. That would lead to the development of high-performance nanoparticle catalysts based on alloys of various compositions. chemistry has an energy density of up to 200 Wh/kg,” said Tim Poor, president of Advanced Cell Engineering. “The architecture of our VLF cell will increase energy density even further, to about 250 Wh/kg.” The KIST team has synthesised a platinum cobalt vanadium alloy nanoparticle catalyst using this technology, and used the oxygen reduction reaction to create hydrogen fuel cell electrodes. As a result, the catalyst activity was seven and three times higher than those of the platinum and platinum-cobalt alloy catalysts respectively that are used commercially in hydrogen fuel cells at present. The team also investigated the effect of adding vanadium to other metals in the nanoparticles. They found through computer simulation that vanadium improved the catalyst performance by optimising the platinum-oxygen bonding energy. BATTERIES FUEL CELLS TheGrid The ACE VLF pack eliminates the need for a modular cell structure 12 Autumn 2022 | E-Mobility Engineering