AUTONEWS

Scania and Northvolt present a Li-Ion battery with a endurance of over 1.5 million km

We should see more and more electric trucks. For courier services, electric drive is already becoming quite common in cities today, many carriers are also using it for bus transport, especially urban transport. It’s usually not the majority of their fleet either way. In the future, however, it is also expected to be used for longer routes, which requires batteries with a long service life and also an adequate charging infrastructure. Compared to the situation with internal combustion engines, however, the car manufacturers themselves take care of it to an increased extent. As for long-life batteries, we have a new product in the form of Li-Ion batteries from a Swedish company Northvolt. Trucks will use it here Scania.

These are accumulators manufactured in Europe, specifically in Sweden, with the help of electricity that does not come from fossil sources. Thanks to this, their carbon footprint is one-third that of the NMC111 accumulators from 2019. This also means that in terms of emissions, such a cell will compare with an internal combustion truck already at a third of the distance compared to the past (differences in the production of engines and other accessories can also interfere with this). Cells are already being produced at the Northvolt Ett factory in the north of Sweden, and Scania itself will open its battery factory in Södertälje this year.

The new batteries have been developed to last the entire life of the car, i.e. driven 1.5 million km. What exactly these articles are, however, has not been published. The service life can be increased very easily with two “tricks”. One is to simply make the battery bigger. If the battery has a service life of, for example, 1,000 cycles and the car can drive 300 km with it, on paper it should be able to handle approximately 270,000 km. With a twice as large battery with a range of 600 km, without any further changes to the battery chemistry, we can get around 540,000 km with 1000 cycles.

The second trick is to make a large buffer, which is common for trucks. They probably have 25% of the capacity there just in the buffer. The essence of this trick is that the car has a much shorter range than it should have due to the total size of the battery, and the aging of the batteries “bites” mainly from the buffer, but not so much from the available battery capacity and the amount of energy that can be used. If we simplify it, if we have, for example, a 1000kWh battery, but only 750kWh is made available by the manufacturer for operation, then even after 20% wear the battery has 800kWh, which is more than 750kWh available for operation, even when the battery has been degraded in this way, it theoretically has an unchanged reach We don’t know how much Scania and Northvolt used these features when developing their battery.

All that is known about the new battery is that it is a prismatic cell with a capacity of 157 Ah and a voltage of 3.6 V, which gives the possibility of storing 565 Wh of energy.

Milan Šurkala/Mundoquatrorodas