Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Now that hybrid passenger cars have scored an enormous marketing success in North America, the struggle has begun to make them competitive with comparable gasoline-powered and diesel vehicles in delivered fuel efficiency and environmental impact. Much of this work focuses on the huge, heavy, short-lived, and environmentally costly battery packs that store energy the vehicles capture from their internal-combustion engines and recapture from their own momentum.
Over the next three years, the Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany will collaborate with Volkswagen to explore lithium-polymer accumulators as alternatives to the lithium-ion batteries today’s vehicles often use. The four organizations are working under a development program that Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Environment and other organizations launched.
The Fraunhofer portion of the project includes three interrelated programs. In one program, researchers are investigating new electrode materials that will have high energy-storage density but low impact on the environment. A second portion of the project is developing IC-based battery-management techniques that will control such variables as current and temperature to allow much denser packing of cells than is currently feasible. The third program is developing the power electronics to allow the control circuitry to manage safely charging and discharging of the cells. The researchers will integrate all three technologies—the new cells, the new management circuitry, and the new power devices—into a high-density module for use in vehicles.
The goal of the project is for Volkswagen to begin field tests of the new power modules in 2010. The company would presumably later incorporate the modules into a new generation of hybrid vehicles.
By: DocMemory
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