Frank Markus
NEWS I OPINION I GOSSIP I STUFFTe chnologue
FEBRUARY 2020 MOTORTREND.COM 25R
emember the Lamborghini Terzo Millennio
concept, launched in November 2017? This wild
design study showed Lamborghini’s impression
of what a fully electric future hypercar might look
like. The design was launched at the same time the
company publicized its research partnerships with the
chemistry and mechanical engineering departments
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now the
chem department program has paid off in a patent.
An electric car simply cannot be a true Lamborghini if
it’s burdened with hundreds of pounds of batteries that
make it weigh more than today’s raging bulls. A great way
to reduce an EV’s weight would be to use supercapacitors
instead of chemical batteries.
Supercaps are spectacularly efficient at storing lots
of energy quickly, but they’re lousy at storing energy for
an extended period of time. No matter how hard your
electric supercar regeneratively brakes going into a turn
or how fast it zooms back out of it, an appropriately sized
supercapacitor can accept and release this power without
overheating the way a chemical battery would. Bonus fact:
They can do this racy charge/discharge dance millions
of times without degrading.
So Lamborghini and MIT set a research goal of tripling
the energy storage capacity of these supercapacitors
within four years. After just two years, the team devised
a material that doubles capacity. They’re still working
toward that additional incremental improvement, but
the research to date was deemed significant
enough to warrant a patent application in
the names of the Lamborghini and MIT
engineers responsible. The patent covers
the chemical and geometric properties of
the powdered material inside the supercapacitors.
This announcement marks a significant milestone in
the research phase of the technology, but its development
phase has yet to start. This will include determining the
glue or paste that will affix the powder to its metallic
electrode strip, a manufacturing technique to roll or
fold it into a cylindrical or pouch form factor, and then
mechanical and life-cycle testing.
Today’s supercapacitors typically use porous activated
carbon, which includes zillions of nano-sized pockets for
the electric ions to affix themselves to. The new powder iscomposed of metal-organic framework (MOF) compounds
consisting primarily of nickel, copper, and molecular
carbon (not atomic carbon graphene sheets or nanotubes).
Past MOFs have been incapable of conducting electricity,
but this new one can store it, thanks to the new way these
elements and molecules are arranged to roughly double
the surface area inside the same volume/mass of powder,
which is how it doubles the energy density. That area now
measures “tens of thousands of square meters per gram.”
Note that the elements in question are all abundant and
the manufacturing technique should be very similar to
today’s supercapacitors, so cost shouldn’t be terribly high.
Even at double today’s energy density (which is triple
the density of the best supercapacitors 10
years ago), electric vehicles may never run
on supercapacitors alone. They’ll still require
some chemical battery storage. Lamborghini’s
collaboration with MIT’s mechanical engi-
neering department is researching the possibility of inte-
grating solid-state battery storage into the vehicle’s central
carbon-fiber structure in the least crash-vulnerable areas.
This “built in, not bolted on” approach promises increased
safety, smaller packaging, and lighter weight. The team has
yet to reach a patentable milestone and is not divulging much
information about its progress, but we do know it involves
elemental carbon nanotubes that are “grown” perpendicular
to and connecting with two layers of structural carbon fiber
separated by some small number of microns.
Alternating nanotubes serve as anodes and cathodes,
closely separated by a solid-state electrolyte, about which no
info has been divulged. (MIT has several programs ongoing
in this space, and with power-optimized supercapacitors on
board, said electrolyte can be optimized for energy storage.)
Lamborghini CEO Stefano Domenicali has teased
a future research project “in the dimension of sound,” a
cryptic hint that has us intrigued. QFuture Te ch: Lamborghini’s
e-Hypercar Inches Toward Viability
Supercapacitors
look nothing
like “flux
capacitors,”
and making
any electrical
hardware look
sexy represents
an MIT-grade
challenge.