Yes, you have read right. Toyota has developed what it says is “the world’s first method for observing the behavior of lithium ions in an electrolyte when a battery charges and discharges.” Able to observe those ions for the first time in real time, Toyota researchers think they have found the reason why a battery ages. Once the breakthrough is commercialized, which could take “two to three years,” a new lithium ion battery could improve the battery-powered range of an electric vehicle by 15%, Dr. Hisao Yamashige of Toyota’s advanced R&D and engineering division told a small group of reporters this morning at the company’s Tokyo HQ.
It took three years’ work, and a giant synchrotron northeast of Kobe, Japan, for Toyota to finally be able to observe the travel of ions from a battery’s minus to its plus side, the reason why the desired electricity is created. In the Spring-8 synchrotron, a ring with a 5,000 ft diameter, built around a hill in Japan’s Hyogo Prefecture, researchers bombarded batteries with radiation a billion times stronger than a chest X-ray, to create moving images on a high-speed camera. The synchrotron, one of the world’s largest, was developed jointly by the RIKEN Institute and the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. The ring can be rented for only $600 per hour by those who want to keep the research to themselves. Publish your research, and the ring is yours free of charge. Today’s press conference could have saved notoriously frugal Toyota some money.
Studying the migration of ions from minus to plus, researchers could observe a kind of ion constipation that develops during the course of battery charging and recharging. When the battery begins to suffer intestinal problems, “the ions can no longer flow freely, they get blocked, and battery performance decreases,” as Yamashige-san tried to explain the phenomena in terms simple enough for the assembled reporters to understand. Despite valiant attempts at popular science, even Reuters’ star reporter Nori Shirouzu had to admit that he “was lost.”
To make a long story short, Toyota’s battery-boffins expect to use the new observation method to develop batteries that hold a better charge, and lead a longer life. Yamashige said he hopes to see commercialization in “a couple of years,” for improvements of “10 to 15%.” When I asked him why we hear so much about huge gains in future battery technology, and then he can promise only a marginal increase after all that scientific effort, Yamashige said that’s all he can do, “sorry to disappoint you.”
15%. Yes, that’s it.
As I stepped outside of Toyota’s HQ building into a Tokyo experiencing an early dusting of wet snow, Wall Street Journal reporter Sean McLain opened his umbrella next to me, and muttered: “Engineers.”
We probably didn’t grasp the momentousness of the discovery. For an audience that can better appreciate the research, the findings will be presented at the 57th International Symposium on Batteries, Fuel Cells and Capacitors, taking place next week at Tokyo’s Makuhari Messe.
