Transportation Storage

United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) is developing a new climate-control system for EVs that uses a hybrid vapor compression adsorption system with thermal energy storage. The targeted, closed system will use energy during the battery-charging step to recharge the thermal storage, and it will use minimal power to provide cooling or heating to the cabin during a drive cycle. The team will use a unique approach of absorbing a refrigerant on a metal salt, which will create a lightweight, high-energy-density refrigerant.

The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) will demonstrate a high-energy density and low-cost thermal storage system that will provide efficient cabin heating and cooling for EVs. Compared to existing HVAC systems powered by electric batteries in EVs, the innovative hot-and-cold thermal batteries-based technology is expected to decrease the manufacturing cost and increase the driving range of next-generation EVs. These thermal batteries can be charged with off-peak electric power together with the electric batteries.

Sheetak is developing a new HVAC system to store the energy required for heating and cooling in EVs. This system will replace the traditional refrigerant-based vapor compressors and inefficient heaters used in today's EVs with efficient, light, and rechargeable hot-and-cold thermal batteries. The high energy density thermal battery—which does not use any hazardous substances—can be recharged by an integrated solid-state thermoelectric energy converter while the vehicle is parked and its electrical battery is being charged.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is developing a new class of advanced nanomaterial called an electrical metal organic framework (EMOF) for EV heating and cooling systems. The EMOF would function similar to a conventional heat pump, which circulates heat or cold to the cabin as needed. However, by directly controlling the EMOF's properties with electricity, the PNNL design is expected to use much less energy than traditional heating and cooling systems. The EMOF-based heat pumps would be light, compact, efficient, and run using virtually no moving parts.

The University of Utah is developing a compact hot-and-cold thermal battery using advanced metal hydrides that could offer efficient climate control system for EVs. The team's innovative designs of heating and cooling systems for EVs with high energy density, low-cost thermal batteries could significantly reduce the weight and eliminate the space constraint in automobiles. The thermal battery can be charged by plugging it into an electrical outlet while charging the electric battery and it produces heat and cold through a heat exchanger when discharging.

Carnegie Mellon University will use deep reinforcement learning and atomistic machine learning potentials to predict catalyst surface stability under reaction conditions. Current methods for determining the metastability of bifunctional and complex surfaces undergoing reaction are difficult and expensive. Carnegie Mellon’s technology will enable stability analysis in both traditional catalysts and new classes of materials, including those used in tribology (friction), corrosion-resistant alloys, additive manufacturing, and battery materials.

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and team will develop an integrated machine learning-accelerated design and optimization workflow that will reduce the time and cost required to develop functional energy materials in devices. The core innovation pairs machine learning based filtering of candidate materials with accelerated high-fidelity modeling to efficiently search a large design space for high-performance materials under realistic operating conditions.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will develop a machine learning-enhanced approach to the design of new battery materials. Currently, such materials are designed in part via numerous expensive high-fidelity computational simulations that predict the performance of a given composition. However, at present, humans must sift through the vast amounts of data generated and manually identify new compositions.

Sila Nanotechnologies is developing a high-throughput technology for scalable synthesis of high-capacity nanostructured materials for Li-Ion EV batteries. The successful implementation of this technology will allow improvements in energy storage capacity of today’s best batteries at half the cost. In contrast to other high-capacity material synthesis technologies, Sila's materials show minimal volume changes during the battery operation, which is a key challenge of next-generation battery anode materials.

Researchers at Missouri University of Science & Technology (Missouri S&T) are developing an affordable lithium-air (Li-Air) battery that could enable an EV to travel up to 350 miles on a single charge. Today’s EVs run on Li-Ion batteries, which are expensive and suffer from low energy density compared with gasoline. This new Li-Air battery could perform as well as gasoline and store 3 times more energy than current Li-Ion batteries. A Li-Air battery uses an air cathode to breathe oxygen into the battery from the surrounding air, like a human lung.