This New Lab Could Make Electric Vehicles Much Safer

Tucked away in the maze of buildings at Sandia National Labs is a series of experiments working to make roadways safe. While the ‘BAT Lab” has nothing to do with a certain DC Comics superhero, their work could save lives.

Tucked away in the maze of buildings at Sandia National Labs is a series of experiments working to make roadways safe. While the ‘BAT Lab” has nothing to do with a certain DC Comics superhero, their work could save lives.

Lorraine Torres-Castro may not be a caped crusader, but her work is certainly protecting the good citizens of any city that’s home to electric vehicles.

Torres-Castro and her team don’t work in the catacombs of Gotham City, they’re working in the BAT Lab with Sandia National Laboratories.

“BAT” is short for “battery abuse testing” and in this lab, a team of scientists is pushing batteries to their limits in order to make their use safer.

“We work from very small batteries up to what you will have in a watch. Very small coin cells is [sic] what we call them up to, great energy storage batteries. So that also, includes electric vehicle batteries, grid energy storage cell phones, laptops; almost anything that you could imagine,” says Torres-Castro.

The lab is currently focused on electric vehicle batteries, which are high-voltage lithium-ion. It’s the same technology that powers most personal electronics, just at a much bigger scale. Their high performance and low self-discharge make them great solutions, especially for EVs, but when they fail, they can cause major damage and injury, and while there are sensors to alert consumers of a threat, there’s very little time they will have if a battery is about to go.

“The reality is right now, we’re looking on the order of minutes,” says Alex Bates. He is a research scientist in the BAT Lab and he says the goal of their work is to turn those minutes of warning into hours, days, and even weeks.

“They start off with a lot of gas generation. So there’s going to be a lot of gas that comes out of the compartment or the cell. And that can, of course, make ingress into the cabin or things like that. But the worst type of failures are the abrupt failures that cause fire and flame jets to come out of the battery pack. Passengers are typically usually shielded by the pack itself, but it’s still a concern,” Bates says.

While EV car fires are less frequent than gas-powered vehicles, the threat is still there, especially for first responders called out to a crash. EV batteries aren’t a solid brick of energy. They function more as a network of smaller batteries within a large housing. If one of those cells has a “thermal runaway,” which is a fancy way of saying a cell catches fire, it could trigger a chain reaction that can engulf the vehicle in minutes.

The BAT Lab is developing sensors that can detect the earliest signs of failure, thereby giving car owners and mechanics a heads-up before disaster strikes. “Our goal is to do a survey of available techniques now that maybe are too large and cumbersome to fit in an EV at this point in time. But the idea is that that technology if it’s proven, will be able to shrink down and fit into an EV,” says Bates.

Testing includes heating the batteries to the point that they catch on fire, piercing them with nails, crushing them with hammers, over-charging, discharging, and even submerging them in water and Torres-Castro says all that destructive work is paying off.

“We are improving every day. So we are learning from past, failures, and we are developing strategies to mitigate those for sure. I will say we are moving in the right direction,” Torres-Castro says.

Bates says that, if successful, their testing could find ways into EV batteries within the next few years.