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Renewable energy for mining electrification

Over the centuries, mining has earned a reputation as a dirty and dangerous business that scars and poisons landscapes while consuming huge amounts of energy. However, the extracted raw materials are essential to the world economy in general and, specifically, to the drive toward electrification as a means of reducing global carbon emissions.

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AI and battery management systems

AI is with us and it’s being incorporated into battery management systems (BMS), but its implementation faces challenges, writes Peter Donaldson. Machine learning (ML) is applied to improve the accuracy of state estimation, with neural networks and support vector machines analysing historical data, and driving patterns and environmental conditions to estimate, predict and optimise battery states of charge, health and power.

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Multi-chemistry batteries

A little over a year ago, a BMW iX electric SUV fitted experimentally with a dual-chemistry Gemini battery pack from Our Next Energy (ONE) drove 978 km (608 miles) on a single charge – an impressive achievement for such a large, heavy car, writes Peter Donaldson.

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Electrode-to-pack

In the quest for energy density in EV batteries, cell-to-pack (CTP) architectures represent an approach that increases the proportion of active materials by eliminating modules, and their associated structure and interconnections.

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The EV support structure

One of the signs of maturity we should look for in BEV technology is the existence of a robust market in used cars, writes Peter Donaldson. Evidence of this would include a good choice of makes and models with prices that, while strong, are significantly lower than new prices, and they reflect age, mileage, service history and overall condition.

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Bipolar batteries

When Toyota unveiled plans for its next generation of EV technology in June 2023, the company made it clear that bipolar batteries would play a central role. The company is already using bipolar architecture in the nickel-metal hydride batteries in its Crown

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Wide bandgap semiconductors: comparing SiC and GaN for electric vehicles

As system voltages in EV powertrains increase to enable the use of higher power levels without creating excessive currents and the associated energy losses and heat dissipation problems, so does the importance of wide bandgap semiconductors,

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Extinguishing lithium battery fires

Our battery show report in this issue contains stories on various materials engineered to prevent a thermal runaway in a cell in a lithium-ion pack from spreading and cause a major fire (writes Peter Donaldson). Prevention is better than cure because, rare

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Squaring the circular economy

Anyone who has been to a vehicle scrapyard will know that recovery of components and reuse of materials has long been part of the automotive industry. However, today the focus on the circular economy is sharpening and the cradle-to-grave concept of a product’s

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Better eVTOL landings

Battery-powered manned eVTOL aircraft intended to operate to and from urban vertiports have a sharply limited energy budget, so designing energy-efficient flight profiles for them is obviously important – and if those profiles can also improve passenger comfort and safety at the same time, so much the better