‘Something we hadn’t seen before’

Scientists are working hard to improve the technology around electric vehicle batteries — but the latest breakthrough that could revolutionize the EV battery space was created by accident, Live Science reported.

The breakthrough is a new material structure that allows the capacitors in EVs to dissipate energy much more slowly, allowing the batteries to potentially last much longer on a single charge.

Researchers from the Washington University in St. Louis and Massachusetts Institute of Technology stumbled on the new structure by accident — a happy accident, as it turned out.  The new technology can deliver energy density up to 19 times higher than current capacitors. They published their findings in the journal Science.

Crucially, the researchers said that the new structure would not affect the charge time, meaning that it could charge just as quickly but last much longer.

“We found that dielectric relaxation time can be modulated or induced by a very small gap in the material structure,” Sang-Hoon Bae, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Washington University and one of the study’s authors, said in a statement. “That new physical phenomenon is something we hadn’t seen before. It enables us to manipulate dielectric material in such a way that it doesn’t polarize and lose charge capability.”

There was a somewhat similarly unexpected discovery this year at Cambridge, where scientists found that a “messy” internal structure allowed capacitors to store “far more energy.” 

Improving the energy density of electric vehicle batteries is one of the best ways to allow EVs to travel longer distances between charges. 

While EVs produce significantly less planet-overheating air pollution than traditional gas-powered vehicles, their adoption rates have slowed recently. This is partly due to “range anxiety,” the fear many consumers have of being stranded with an empty battery between charging stations. 

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More energy-dense batteries that can also hold and deliver a charge longer could help in alleviating that anxiety.

Other notable recent attempts at creating EVs with longer ranges include solid-state batteries made in China, as well as some solid-state batteries made in the United States. 

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