Precourt Institute special event: Battery fast charging for affordable and sustainable EVs

Smaller, faster-charging batteries are the answer for affordable and sustainable electric vehicles for everyone, everywhere. It can cut EV costs, lower demand for critical minerals, and deliver a gas station-type experience. However, 10-minute charging of today’s batteries requires lengthy pre-warming in cold conditions and faces safety challenges in hot environments. In this talk, Underwriters Laboratories' Chao-Yang Wang will explain how fast charging is not a chemistry problem fundamentally, but a heating problem. Wang, executive director of UL's Electrochemical Safety Research Institute and emeritus professor at Pennsylvania State University, will introduce an asymmetric temperature modulation approach that enables 10-minute charging of lithium-ion batteries across a wide temperature range, -60°C to +75°C, while maintaining remarkable cycle life. This points to a new paradigm in battery design and thermal management, without having to trade-off among fast charge, safety, lifetime, and cost.