If you’re a regular viewer of vaguely  science-based YouTube channels like this one then you’ll probably know only too well that  we’re living in a rapidly changing world where some bright spark somewhere on the planet  is coming up with a technology or device that gets hailed as a game changer or revolutionary  breakthrough almost every week.

Most of them don’t end up changing any games or starting  any revolutions though, but every now and then science hits the jackpot and the world takes  another technological leap forward. Way back in 1959 the American physicist Richard Feynman  gave a talk in which he described his vision for one of these winners.

It was a process that  would allow scientists to manipulate and control individual atoms and molecules. That might not  sound earth-shattering to our 21st century ears but it was pure science fiction back then.

 Feynman’s dream became a reality in the 80s though with the advent of something called the scanning  tunneling microscope for which its inventors, Gerd Binning and Heinrich Rohrer received  the Nobel prize for physics in 1986.

That invention allowed scientists to do  precisely what Feynman had envisaged more than two decades earlier and the world got  a fancy new word to add to the dictionary… nanotechnology.

Since then nanotechnology  has genuinely revolutionized almost every aspect of our modern day lives from pharmaceutical  products to construction materials and industrial processes through to fuel efficiency and even  the clothes we wear.

And now nanotechnology has reached the world of electric vehicle batteries  and needless to say it’s gonna be a game changer! Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. So we  know that nanotechnology is to do with atomic and molecular scale stuff, which means we’re  talking small right? I mean really small.

A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. A human hair  is about a hundred thousand nanometers wide so the ability to manipulate stuff at nanoscale is pretty  spectacularly smart science. And it turns out when you get down to that kind of microscopic level  weird stuff happens.

Atoms start reflecting light differently for example, so gold can become purple  and silver can become yellow “and your mommy suddenly becomes your daddy, and everything looks  like a giant cupcake”.

Perhaps more significantly, getting down to Nanometer scale allows scientists  to vastly increase the surface area of a material which means more atoms can interact with atoms of  other materials.

And then all sorts of benefits start kicking in. You get materials that  are stronger, more durable and even more electrically conductive as a result. According  to the US National nanotechnology initiative “Nanotechnology is not simply working at even  smaller dimensions.

Rather working at nanoscale enables scientists to utilize the unique physical  chemical mechanical and optical properties of materials that naturally occur at that scale.”  The potential of nanotechnology certainly hasn’t escaped the attention of the auto industry and in  particular the rapidly developing electric vehicle sector which has spent years and years looking for  ways to reduce weight and improve the performance of vehicle batteries.

Much has been promised by so  many but as is so often the case these days it’s a Chinese company that’ll be the first to launch  an actual vehicle onto the actual market that actually contains nanotechnology in its actual  battery.

They’re called GAC group and they’re about to launch the latest version of their Aion  V crossover SUV featuring lithium-ion batteries enhanced with graphene, which is a nanomaterial  that China is particularly obsessed with.

Specifically GAC’s technology uses graphene  instead of graphite as the anode material. Graphite’s the usual choice for lithium-ion  battery anodes because it easily transfers collected electrons into the metal wires of  an electrical circuit but it does have its limitations.

It takes six carbon atoms in  graphite to hold onto a single lithium ion. That relative weakness limits how much lithium the  electrode can hold onto which in turn dictates how much potential energy the battery can store.

  Studies over many years have shown that unlike a lump of graphite a graphene nanosheet can absorb  lithium ions on both faces of the sheet and along its edges and even in any defect sites. That gives  it a theoretical capacity of 744 milliamp hours per gram compared with only 372 milliamp hours per  gram for graphite.

That’s twice the capacity which is really very significant indeed. The main  limiting factor until recently has been cost. At several hundred dollars per gram, graphene  is still a premium product.

Until we find a way to mass produce it in a more economical way  it’ll probably be limited in its real world applications. But GAC group have come up with a  technology called 3DG or 3-dimensional graphene, which they reckon reduces the graphene cost in  their lithium ion battery anode by a factor of 10, which brings graphene firmly into the realms of  feasible production budgets.

GAC say its graphene based battery has a 6C fast charge capability. In  other words it’s capable of receiving 6 times its total capacity in an hour, which is significantly  higher than any existing EV on the market today.

Charge and discharge rates in batteries are  often expressed using this C rate figure. The higher the number the greater the charge  the battery can accept for its given capacity. The downside with very high C rates is that  they tend to generate high temperatures which can quickly degrade the materials  inside the battery.

And that’s really one of the main limitations holding back the  development of super fast charging for EVs. Graphene is much better at accepting those  higher charges without degradation though, and although GAC haven’t provided specific technical  details of how their 3DG tech works, it’s quite likely that it’s this property of graphene that’s  allowed them to achieve such high charge rates.

The result is the new Aion V can be recharged from  zero to 80 percent in just eight minutes. That’s getting much closer to the time it takes to fill  up an internal combustion engine car with a tank of fuel.

GAC aren’t the only ones to have embraced  a nanotechnology solution for their battery tech though. Mercedes-Benz recently announced a  joint partnership with the U.S company Sila Nanotechnologies, to develop a battery for their  G-class SUV that replaces the graphite in the anode with silicon nanoparticles.

The principle is  not dissimilar to the graphene that GAC have used. A silicon atom can bind to four lithium ions  which in principle means a silicon based anode could store 10 times as much energy as a graphite  anode.

Silicon is very cheap and very abundant so there’s a big commercial advantage there over  graphene. The trouble is as the battery charges up all those lovely lithium ions rush in to bind with  the silicon and the anode swells up by as much as 300 percent and then it shrinks back down again  as the battery discharges.

That’s an awful lot of movement fatigue and it means most developmental  silicon anodes quickly fracture and break down making the battery useless. But once again the  weirdness of nanomaterials has come to the rescue.

They have much higher percentage of their atoms  at the surface relative to the number of atoms in their interior and because those surface atoms  have fewer atomic neighbours locking them in place they can move much more easily to respond to the  stresses and strains of expansion and contraction.

It’s a bit like why aluminium foil can  be bent and scrunched up very easily compared to a thick lump of the same material.  Sila’s silicon nanotechnology is, they tell us, the result of more than 10 years of chemical  research and more than 55 000 iterations, the result of which is a battery with an energy  density of more than 800 watt hours per litre.

Now I don’t know about you but I’m more used  to reading about battery energy in terms of watt hours per kilogram so I had a quick look at  Battery University online and it explains that specific energy or gravimetric energy density  defines battery capacity in weight, which is indeed watt hours per kilogram, but energy density  or volumetric energy density reflects volume in litres.

Whichever metric you choose to focus  on though, the important thing is the relative performance between different battery chemistries.  Sila’s website provides this chart showing the limit of today’s lithium-ion batteries and how  their technology will vastly improve things in the coming years.

Mercedes-Benz are aiming to launch  their new G-Class range with as much as 40 percent more battery energy density as soon as 2024 and I  reckon we can expect to see a whole raft of other manufacturers following suit very quickly.

And  as an added bonus Sila reckon these batteries will be manufactured using 100% renewable energy  at their brand new Washington state facility. I think it’s fair to say we’re still very much  in the wild west territory of the electric vehicle development cycle.

New chemistries  and concepts are popping up all the time, all claiming to be revolutionary game changers of  course! Will you be charging your EV in under 5 minutes in 10 years time or simply topping it up  as you drive along via inductive charging plates under the road surface? Or perhaps you’ll simply  drive into a kiosk when your battery is dead and wait while a robot swaps it out for a fully  charged one.

Maybe we’ll end up filling our cars with hydrogen instead and perhaps we won’t  even own our own vehicle in the coming decades and we’ll just tap on an app and wait two  minutes for an autonomous vehicle to arrive and take us to our destination.

All of these  technologies already exist. It’s just a matter of which one gains market supremacy the fastest. For  someone like me who is now well into middle age it feels like the world has changed beyond  recognition since I learned to drive in a crappy old Nissan Micra more than three  decades ago, but based on what’s going on in the tech world right now, hold on to your  hats folks because you ain’t seen nothing yet! No doubt you’ve got views about these  rapidly developing technologies.

If you do, or if you work in the industry  and you can share some insights with us, then why not jump down to the comments section  below and leave your thoughts there. That’s it for this week though.

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