Dyson bought Sakti3 a few years ago. Very exciting to see that things are moving forward with the solid state batteries that were developed by Sakti3. Luke Workman, the engineer we all owe a great thanks for the amazing Battery design in our Zero's, spoke about this company to motorcycle.com a few years ago.
Current lithium ion Batteries in all EV, including Zero's, use a liquid electrolyte to separate the anode of the battery from the cathode. When you drain the battery electrons separate from the lithium in the anode leaving a lithium ion. The electron goes to the EV motor and the lithium ion goes through the electrolyte to the cathode where it meets back up with it's electron friend.
The liquid electrolyte reacts chemically with the carbon in the anode creating Dendrites and it resists movement of the lithium ions. This is bad for the battery and limits charge and discharge rates and creates heat. The liquid electrolyte is the source of the fire in a battery when things go wrong. Replacing the liquid with a solid eliminates the chemical reaction and if you find a solid that also has low resistance to movement of the lithium ion also reduces the amount of heat generated.
The challenge is finding the right solid that has just the right sized holes to allow the lithium ions to travel through with low resistance and is non-flammable. Finding the right solid has historically been done by using educated guess about what might work then testing. This is a slow trial and error process.
What makes Sakti3 different is that they used super computers to analyze hundreds of thousands of combinations to find a handful that had the highest probability of success and then tested those. They focused the the efforts of the super computers on materials that are cheap and easy to make using existing mass manufacturing techniques. They claimed to have found a winning combination that would give a single brick Zero FX/S a 200 mile range.
A super capacitor is different because instead of using lithium ions the electrons are stored via surface charge (i.e. just has a build up of extra electrons).
I left out a lot of details but the important thing is solid state batteries can be more energy dense, higher power, generate less heat and are safer. They are the holy Grail of energy storage.
After Dyson bought Sakti3 he was rumored to be planning to build a factory to make Sakti3's Batteries. If he is in fact moving forward on that this is very exciting news indeed. [emoji16]
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