48 November/December 2023 | E-Mobility Engineering support for 12 and 24 V DC power, PWM control and LIN bus comms (both with feedback), the idea being to provide flexibility to make changes during development without incurring prohibitive time and cost penalties. The MCV also includes an actuation package with high-torque gearing that allows the use of an innovative sealing package with low leakage and low pressure drop at all ports, Jensen said. The MCV is part of a new family of thermal management valves, some of which will support volumetric flow control in, for example, battery packs divided into modules or zones for thermal management purposes where sensor data may show one zone in need of maximum coolant flow when others don’t. Here, valving with stepped flow control can be as effective as a more complicated threeway valve, Jensen added. This family of valves includes discrete proportional valve (DPV) and discrete piloted proportional valve (DPPV) types. The former use latching solenoids that open and close two different sized orifices to produce zero, low, medium and high flows, each in response to a pulse of power. DPPV types are for systems that need higher coolant flows, relying on the pilot valve to open a combination of low and high flow-rate valves to permit the appropriate flow when needed. This kind of solution, Jensen said, is more robust to shock and vibration than something required to hold position while providing degree-by-degree control. In the event of a failure, these valves can be configured with a fail-safe feature that uses a capacitor and control circuitry to drive them to a customer-defined safe position. Forge Nano presented its Atomic Armor coatings (aka Atomic Layer Deposition, or ALD) for anode and cathode active materials that are applied to improve surface stability and increase the lifetime and safety of batteries. With angstrom-level thickness (0.1 nm) control of the coatings, the process is used to apply materials such as metal oxides to treat the active materials before they are mixed into slurries and applied to foil substrates to form the lithium-ion battery electrodes, Dr Jonathan Travis said. The non-line-of-sight thermal process is applied at industrial scale, and Forge Nano is now treating various material types from different manufacturers. “We’re happy to work with any producer of cathode/anode material and let the data do the talking,” Dr Travis said. “We typically see improvements of between 20% and 80% or more, depending on the material. “We’ll take somebody else’s active material, like an NMC811, and put a subnanometre thick coating of something like aluminium oxide onto it, which protects the surface from degradation by the electrolyte. “Typically you can get decomposition mechanisms such as transition metal ion dissolution leaching into the electrolyte, which can cause all sorts of detrimental issues within the battery, but we’re stabilising that surface electrochemically and allowing for high performance but without the degradation.” Controlling the thickness of the ALD layer is critical to providing the desired protective effects without interfering with key properties of the active material. The ALD process takes place in a reaction chamber that agitates the powders inside it to ensure that the particles don’t stick together. “This allows the gas phase precursors to access the full surface area of the material,” Dr Travis said. The precursor then reacts with the surface of the active materials. TLX’s discrete proportional valve (left) and modular coolant valve
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