By FREDA LEWIS-STEMPEL, MOTORING REPORTER
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The race to bring fast, easy charging to EV drivers is a tight and highly competitive one.
While most people look to car manufacturers or EV charging providers to deliver superfast charging solutions, huge oil and gas companies are pushing ahead with their own concepts.
Shell Lubricants has developed a proprietary immersion cooling fluid that allows EV batteries to charge from 10 to 80 per cent in less than 10 minutes as part of its ‘evolution’ to ‘enable more value with less emissions’.
And crucially without compromising safety, lifespan, or performance of batteries.
Developed in collaboration with RML Group, the Gas-to-Liquid (GTL) technology has been developed to unlock significant reductions in charging times and to tackle two of the biggest EV adoption barriers: charging speed and range anxiety.
Jason Wong, global executive vice president, Shell Lubricants said: ‘This evolution is a testament to our commitment to collaborative innovation towards enabling more value with less emissions – building on our experience in high-performance transformer oils, proprietary GTL technology, and single-phase immersion cooling fluids for data centres.’
Shell Lubricants, the lubricant supplier and part of Shell Global, has developed a proprietary immersion cooling fluid that allows EV batteries to charge from 10 to 80% in under 10 minutes
Shell’s high-performance EV thermal management fluid reduces thermal stresses on the battery by significantly allowing higher cell charging currents to be tolerated.
These Thermal Fluids are electrically non-conductive fluids which facilitate excellent heat transfer by filling all of the interstitial spaces within the battery pack, maximising direct contact between the fluid and each battery cell.
They can accommodate very high levels of heat generation associated with rapid charging – this ensures consistency and control of temperatures across the battery pack whilst offering enhanced protection against adverse thermal events.
Together with RML Group, Shell made a 34kWh battery pack with Shell EV-Plus Thermal Liquid to develop a battery that can charge from 10 to 80 per cent in under 10 minutes.
Shell says if utilised in a carefully designed lightweight and aerodynamic car operating with an economy of 10 km/kWh, a charging rate of 24km per minute spent charging would be achieved – significantly higher than the typical 5km per minute currently attained by many existing BEV.
Shell’s high-performance EV thermal management fluid reduces thermal stresses on the battery by very significantly allowing higher cell charging currents to be tolerated
And that it optimises performances whilst significantly reducing the number and mass of components.
The outcome is that immersion cooling enables the production of smaller, lighter, batteries capable of up to five times more range addition than typical BEVs, and crucially can be charged via the existing EV charging network.
Robert Mainwaring, Shell’s lead engineer on the project, added: ‘Consumers are in pursuit of better energy efficiency, longer driving range and faster charging.
‘Our ambition within this project was to show how Shell EV-Plus Thermal Fluids can support significant reductions in charging time without compromising cell integrity and lifetime.
‘By embracing advanced thermal management solutions, we believe this will open the door to a new generation of more sustainable, efficient and cost-effective battery electric vehicle solutions.’
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