ELECTRIC CARS: THE FUTURE AS METAL-AIR BATTERY OUT PERFORMS LI-ION BATTERY

As the quest for green revolution intensifies, the next big thing is the replacement of gasoline by electric cars. IEEE's monthly issue reports that significant advancement and improvements to a research model that began in 2009 at the IBM Almaden Research Center, in San Jose, California has metamorphosed into a multinational partnership with commercial and academic participants in Europe, Asia, and the United States. 

This technology is based on a car that will be powered by Metal-Air  batteries and should be able to run at least 800km or 500 miles per day before it is retired for charging. Metal-air technology is a new technology  which packs far more energy into a battery of a given mass than today’s state-of-the-art technology, the lithium-ion battery

Illustration: Elias Stein

The research and development team on this project have however maintained the proposal that Electric cars will remain mostly niche products until they have a range of 800 kilometers, or roughly 500 miles, with an affordable battery.

That’s as far as most people would want to drive in a day, and then they have all night to recharge

Electric cars are to function fully on Electric motors. Electric motors are ideally suited for powering cars. They’re lightweight and extremely powerful, they achieve efficiencies in excess of 90 percent, they don’t need complex transmissions, and they churn out torque in just the right way, providing full rotational force starting with zero rpms. Internal-combustion engines, by contrast, don’t produce high torque until they’re spinning at thousands of rotations per Minute (rpms).

THE DRAWBACK OF ELECTRIC CARS RIGHT NOW

But even though they’re propelled by a near-ideal mechanism, electric cars have a huge drawback, which is the low energy content of the batteries. Gasoline packs about 13,000 watt-hours per kilogram; the best production lithium-ion cells store only about 250 Wh/kg. Add the mass of the ancillary battery equipment—including the bus bars, cooling system, and battery management system—and the energy density of the entire system drops by half, giving the batteries a pitiful 1 percent of the raw energy density of gasoline.

THE ADVANTAGE OF ELECTRIC CARS

One major factor in favor of the electric car is the high efficiency with which it converts battery power to motive power at the wheels—about six times as efficiently as the average for gasoline-fueled cars in the United States. Also, electric car makers put the biggest, heaviest battery they can reasonably fit into their designs. 

THE REMAINING CHALLENGE

Despite the massive work and finance put into this research the achievable distance ranges still fall far short of the 500-mile target ,ore work needs to be one to make electric-car batteries attain at least twice the energy density of Li-ion cells to achieve a range of 800 km.

Though the electric cars are still some years away from commercialization Nigeria and other majorly oil producing and exporting countries should research and develop alternative sources of energy to remain economically relevant.