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Lithium Batteries And Lithium Ion Batteries

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While Lithium based batteries have allowed electronic products to become more portable, current applications of lithium based batteries are starting to show the limitations of the current technology. These limitations include aspects such as energy density, charge rate, and the usable lifetime of the battery. Furthermore, over the past decade safety concerns of lithium ion batteries have become more and more apparent in both industrial and consumer uses of lithium based batteries.

The push towards electric cars in recent years has resulted in an exponential growth in the demand for lithium-ion batteries that have a large capacity since a fully electric car is limited by the max capacity of its battery. According to battery university, …show more content…

If ignited, these gases can cause enclosed areas to overpressurize, and if unmitigated, this overpressure can result in an explosion and severe damage to the battery and surrounding equipment or people.(9)” The risk of this happening increases as battery size increases since if one cell fails in a way that emits a large amount of heat, it can heat up the surrounding cells to heat up and subsequently fail. Jason Hughes conducted a teardown of the lithium ion battery in the Tesla Model S P100D and discovered that the 100 kWh battery contained 8,256 cells, while tesla does have safety measures in place to prevent the cells from being damaged, a single manufacturing defect in any of the 8,256 cells could cause a cascading thermal runaway event.

An alternative solution to the limited range of electric vehicles is to offer a large number of publicly available charging stations for electric vehicles. These charging stations boast a charging rate of 170 miles in 30 minutes, which is much faster than the 4 hours and 56 minutes that a standard wall connector would take to charge the car to this range as calculated on Tesla’s website(12). The problem with this solution is that while lithium based batteries can be charged quickly through processes such as tesla 's supercharging, the longevity of the battery can be greatly damaged by doing so. Fast charging a lithium based battery is most effective then the battery is almost depleted and the voltage per cell

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