A new battery technology that will allow electric
vehicles to travel farther on a single charge — with significant improvement in
safety and cold weather performance — received the Clean Tech top prize of
$60,000 in the 10th annual UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge pitch
competition on May 30, 2017.
The winning technology was developed by a team of engineers
and business students at UC San Diego who have founded a new company, called South
8 Technologies, in order to push this technology to market. "We're very
grateful for this award and visibility. It's a confidence booster to know that
we're developing the right tech at the right time," said UC San Diego
materials science and engineering Ph.D. alumnus and South 8 Technologies
founder Cyrus Rustomji.
South 8 Technologies was one of six finalist teams that
competed in this year's Entrepreneur Challenge. The competition consisted of
three tracks: High Tech, Life Tech and Clean Tech. Teams from each track
pitched their business plans to local entrepreneurs and professionals with the
aim of getting funds to help turn their startups into successful businesses.
The South 8 team developed a technology that enables
lithium batteries to run at record low temperatures, down to -60 degrees
Celsius (-76 degrees Fahrenheit). In comparison, today's lithium batteries have
a low temperature limit of -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit).
"One of the big issues with electric vehicles is proper thermal management
of the battery pack in cold winter months because batteries do not perform well
at low temperature, which can decrease mileage. Our batteries can circumvent
this issue," said Jungwoo Lee, a nanoengineering Ph.D. student at UC San
Diego and member of South 8 Technologies.
The ability to operate at low temperature is also useful
for extreme environment applications such as heavy-duty automotive engine
cold-start, high atmosphere WiFi drones or weather balloons, satellites and
aerospace applications. The technology can even be extended to ultra-low
temperature applications, such as batteries to power spacecraft for
interplanetary exploration.
Researchers achieved this exceptional low temperature
performance by replacing the conventional liquid electrolyte in lithium batteries
with what's called a liquefied gas electrolyte — gas that's stored under mild
pressures in the liquid state. "Our liquefied gas electrolytes are
conceptually similar to a propane tank for your barbecue grill. Propane is a
gas at room temperature and pressure but may be liquefied when stored in a tank
under its own vapor pressure," Rustomji said.
"Most work is currently being done in exploring
liquid electrolytes and many battery researchers are exploring solid state
electrolytes as another alternative. But we're going in the completely opposite
direction by exploring gas-based electrolytes."
The technology offers other advantages as well. Liquefied
gas electrolytes can potentially increase the energy density of lithium
batteries by 50 to 100 percent, meaning that electric vehicles travel much
farther on a single charge. These electrolytes also alleviate a problem called
thermal runaway, which is when a battery's internal temperature gets hot enough
to set off a dangerous chain of chemical reactions that in turn heat up the
battery even more. "Our liquefied gas electrolyte offers a unique method
of mitigating this thermal runaway which makes the battery safer,"
Rustomji said.
Rustomji came up with the idea to use liquefied gas
electrolytes as a graduate student in the Sustainable Power and Energy Center
(SPEC) at UC San Diego under professor Shirley Meng. After graduating with his
Ph.D. in 2015, Rustomji continued on as a postdoc to further improve the novel
battery chemistry and later joined with Lee and two other engineers in Meng’s
lab who soon after became part of the core South 8 Technologies team.
"I couldn't be more grateful for this team,"
Rustomji said. "They often credit me with inventing this technology, but
it's always been a team effort from the start. I owe the early success of South
8 Technologies to our talented engineers and advisor Professor Meng, who have been
incredibly supportive, and to the MBA students and business advisor on our team
who have been helpful in shaping our business focus."
Lee also noted that part of the team's success stems from
a pilot program launched by the UC San Diego Institute for the Global
Entrepreneur. Lee and several other members of South 8 Technologies are part of
the first class of this pilot program, which teams Jacobs School of Engineering
graduate students with MBA students in the Rady School of Management and
teaches these students how to develop a business plan.
"The classes taught us how to better pitch our tech
to business people," Lee said. "As engineers, we often describe a
technological advance as something that's X percentage better than Y. But to
succeed in the business world, we need to describe our tech as something that
results in greater value to the customer — something that is worth replacing
the existing product."
One of the big selling points made by the South 8 team is
that their new electrolyte can be seamlessly integrated into existing battery
manufacturing processes. "I think what caught the judges' attention at the
Entrepreneur Challenge is that we've developed an inexpensive, drop-in
replacement electrolyte which is compatible with conventional batteries being
made today. There's no need to redesign an entire manufacturing supply line. I
think this is where so many other battery startups have failed," Rustomji
said.
