Today, Imara Corporation announced a new battery suitable for everything from power tools, lawnmowers and electric vehicles. Not only is it a huge range of applications, the best news is that they’re announcing production of their cells – something you haven’t heard much about from other battery R&D shops.
The battery technology is lithium-manganese-cobalt, and based on their performance characteristics the cells look to line up pretty good with the performance needs for all sorts of applications.
The first chart from that link above shows the chart of the battery capacity at various discharge rates. The 5A is the rate that I look at for how it would behave in an electric vehicle. If you look at the Ragone plot and the cycle life chart, you can start to reverse engineer the variables that matter when it comes to electric cars. The numbers work out fairly well for an electric car assuming they can keep these same figures as they scale the cell size upwards for electric car configurations.
We’ll start with those three parameters. The Ragone chart indicates that you can get 120Wh/kg and about 850W/kg. For a E-REV this allows for 120kW of battery power, 120kg battery, and 16.8kWh of energy storage. So for 8.8kWh energy usage, that’s a depth of discharge (D0D) of 52%. So what does that look like for CARB warranties? Assuming that their cycle life is about 2,000 cycles at 50% (their 100% D0D is about 700 cycles, cycle count is logarithmic based on D0D, so you can expect 2-3 times better cycle count, per Motorola). That should be enough to satisfy the necessary requirements for the CARB 150,000 mile warranty (which wouldn’t surprise me if they get decreased between now and then actually – maybe 10 year/130,000 mi).
Likewise the numbers are good for pure EVs as well – turning down the power and increasing the energy density to 140Wh/kg can provide 33kW in 240kg of batteries at 120kW.
So while they’re manufacturing capability might be small now, at least they’re producing cells on what is otherwise standard battery manufacturing equipment. Hopefully they can pull off not only large cells for larger applications like vehicles but mass production as well.
[from Green Car Congress]
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