If you\u2019ve ever held your phone in your hand for too long, you\u2019ll know that batteries heat up. <\/p>\n
A lithium-ion battery \u2013 the basic essential chemistry is the same whether it\u2019s the tiny one in your phone or a big one in an electric car<\/a> \u2013 heats up quite a bit when it\u2019s in use, both when charging and when you\u2019re using its stored power. <\/p>\n That heat can lead to damage, and it\u2019s why batteries have to be thermally controlled to keep them in their optimum window for performance right now, and for longevity into the future. If we\u2019re talking EV batteries, then the best temperature window is in and around 21 degrees. <\/p>\n Clearly, a big lithium-ion battery powering an electric car will become far hotter than that when it\u2019s being used, and so car makers adopt systems to keep the batteries from overheating. <\/p>\n Overheating leads to a loss of performance, potential damage to the battery\u2019s cells, and in the worst and most extreme \u2013 and thankfully vanishingly rare \u2013 cases, a battery fire. <\/p>\n Most of those systems are basically simple radiators. There\u2019s a large panel, usually attached to the bottom of the battery pack, which is connected to a liquid cooling system, although there are some variations on this, such as Tesla, which runs a snake of cooling pipes in between the battery cells. <\/p>\n This works much better than the early air-cooling systems for EV batteries, as any owner of an original Nissan Leaf can attest. Liquid cooling essentially unlocked much better battery performance. <\/p>\n What if we could do better, though? What if we could cool the entire battery pack from the inside? Would that unlock even better performance?<\/p>\n That\u2019s the thinking of Drive, a battery tech start-up established by Dr S\u00e9amus O\u2019Shaughnessy and Dr Daniel Trimble, both of Trinity College Dublin<\/a>. Their idea seems simple on the face of it, but as ever with simple ideas, getting them to work properly is never easy.<\/p>\n