Cash boost jolts Sandia battery project

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - The better battery for electric cars of the near future may have its roots at Sandia National Laboratory and an infusion of federal stimulus money.

The $4.2 million is part of the Department of Energy's FreedomCAR program with the goal of creating safer and more affordable batteries for electric cars.

At Sandia's Battery Abuse Testing Laboratory--the BATLab--researchers spend a good chunk of time trying to make batteries catch fire, explode and just plain fail.

"The reason we want to do that is so that we can give information back to the various manufacturers and hopefully they can use that information to make the batteries safer," Dave Johnson, a BATLab technician said.

It's something they've been doing for more than 15 years. With the help of the $4.2 million they're about to get a serious upgrade to their lab and more.

"That will let us increase the range of testing that we do and the type of batteries we are able to test," BATLab researcher Pete Roth said.

Part of the money will allow Roth and his team to focus on lithium-ion batteries, which will soon be powering electric cars like the Chevrolet Volt expected to be on the market late in 2010.

For now lithium-ion batteries power cell phones and laptops.

"These batteries then will allow someone to drive your car up to 40 miles in all-electric mode before going into a hybrid mode," Roth said.

But with all that power come risks.

"Because they contain so much energy they're hard to harness," Johnson said.

And that's why so much time and energy are spent on testing the batteries in real-world situations simulating car crashes and battery punctures in scenarios that have to keep up with the technology.

"They are constantly changing," Roth said. "Every year there's new materials being proposed, and so the testing has to keep up with the research."

These batteries will be used in electric cars starting in 2011. The new federal funding won't reach the BATLab until sometime next spring.