"The ultimate battery pack would be one that consists of 100 percent active material. That is, every part of the pack stores and releases energy," says Euan McTurk, an electrochemist at Plug Life Consulting. That's because weight is one of the biggest challenges for EV engineers.
Simply plopping in a larger, heavier battery is not a surefire way to increase range. A heavier car requires bigger brakes, bigger brakes require bigger wheels, and the increased weight of it all requires a stronger overall structure. It's what car designers call the "weight spiral"-the bigger the battery, the more dead weight you have to lug around, which can eat away at any potential gain in range.
Traditionally, EV battery manufacturers have used cell modules that are connected and then placed in packs. According to Richie Frost, founder and CEO of electric-vehicle technology company Sprint Power, "standard modules may fit well within one pack but leave large areas of wasted space in another." Wasted space equals dead weight.
That's why Tesla and Chinese companies like BYD and Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) are working on designs that allow batteries to be more efficiently and densely distributed inside the car, getting us closer to that hypothetical ultimate battery pack. The new approaches stand to change the way EVs are produced, boost their range, and lower manufacturing costs.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 2022 من WIRED.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 2022 من WIRED.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Women at the Bottom of the World
They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.
RUSSIAN, GO HOME
WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me - or seek peace in censored oblivion.
The Fateful Eight
THE STORY BEHIND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN RECENT HISTORY.
Can the Internet's Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street?
When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit - on the eve of the company's IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web's most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?
The Unnerving Presence of Javier Bardem
He's known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, he loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.
HAPPY HAUNTING
IN A CHARMING game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator.
THE MYTH OF METAL
How I became a Python programmer - and learned to love our abstract world.
SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS
There's a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIS help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs.
FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD
The sounds of Slack have a secret history.
THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG
The Nvidia CEO turned a graphics-card company into a trillion-dollar AI behemoth. Now he wants to transform the rest of the world-health care, robotics, autonomous driving, the works.