£2 Million Project to Develop Sodium-ion Batteries for Automotive Power Applications
The project aims are to develop and demonstrate low cost 12V batteries for electrified vehicles. These batteries are used for lighting, security and control of the traction battery management system and other critical features. Generally, in electrified vehicles, these batteries use lead acid technology on account of their low cost and specialised requirements.
The consortium is seeking to replace these batteries with lower weight and lower volume batteries of comparable cost and performance based on sodium-ion chemistry, a technology which uses more sustainable and lower cost materials than lithium-ion technology but is otherwise very comparable.
The consortium members include Jaguar Land Rover the automotive supplier, Croda the specialty chemicals company who will be developing electrolyte additives, Talga Technologies who will be focussing on natural carbon anodes, Faradion Ltd the developer of sodium-ion batteries and Warwick University home to the Warwick Manufacturing Group and the centre for battery pilot plant manufacturing in the UK.
