THIS Is What's Really Going On Inside Batteries! | Fully Charged Show Podcast with About:Energy

Summary

Podcast Summary: "THIS Is What's Really Going On Inside Batteries!" | Fully Charged Show Podcast with About:Energy

Release Date: September 23, 2024
Host: Imogen Bogle, The Fully Charged Show
Guest: Dr. Gavin White, Co-founder and CEO of About Energy

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Introduction

In this engaging episode of The Fully Charged Podcast, host Imogen Bogle delves deep into the intricate world of battery technology with Dr. Gavin White, the co-founder and CEO of About Energy, a pioneering battery data and modeling company based in the UK. The conversation, recorded on July 10th and released shortly before the Goodwood Festival of Speed, unpacks the complexities of battery operations, the challenges in the industry, and the innovative solutions that About Energy brings to the table.

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Meet Dr. Gavin White and About Energy

[01:20]
Imogen welcomes Dr. Gavin White, congratulating him on recently defending his PhD. Gavin introduces About Energy as a "world-leading battery data and modeling company" that accurately measures all battery properties. This foundational data assists companies in designing battery systems, charging algorithms, and predicting battery longevity and state of charge.

Notable Quote:
"We provide the really fundamental data to enable companies to do all their activities." — Dr. Gavin White [02:28]

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Understanding the Complexity of Batteries

Gavin explains the common misconception that batteries in devices and vehicles are well-understood. He emphasizes that battery development has been largely empirical, relying on trial and error rather than deep scientific understanding. This gap hinders the accurate modeling and prediction of battery performance.

Key Insights:

• State of Charge Misconception:
  Batteries don't have absolute 100% or 0% states of charge. Instead, their capacity can vary slightly based on conditions, akin to a sponge holding water ([05:39]).

• Manufacturing Variations:
  Even within a single production line, factors like temperature and humidity can cause significant variations in battery performance ([06:12]).

Notable Quote:
"Batteries have been developed called what's called a very empirical process, so very trial and error." — Dr. Gavin White [03:31]

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Founding About Energy: Bridging the Data Gap

Gavin recounts his journey from an engineering student aspiring to work in Formula One to starting About Energy. Inspired by Elon Musk's approach, he pursued a PhD sponsored by Rolls Royce Aerospace, focusing on improving the accuracy of battery pack simulations. The inaccuracies in existing models led him to develop a patented method, ultimately founding About Energy to commercialize this innovation.

Notable Quote:
"At the start of my PhD, which was sponsored by Rolls Royce Aerospace, we were looking at doing these large simulations of battery packs for thermal models. We would do these simulations and then do experiments and they would have these huge errors." — Dr. Gavin White [07:49]

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Collaboration with Monolith: Leveraging AI and Machine Learning

About Energy collaborates with Monolith, an AI company spun out of Imperial College, to enhance battery degradation modeling. By combining About Energy's detailed battery data with Monolith's machine learning capabilities, they can predict battery lifespan with significantly reduced testing time.

Key Points:

• Data-Driven Models:
  Using accurate, physics-based models allows About Energy to simulate numerous scenarios without exhaustive physical testing ([20:50]).

• AI Integration:
  Monolith's AI models utilize this data to estimate battery degradation, cutting down testing time by up to 90% ([22:47]).

Notable Quote:
"We're able to reduce the number of experiments you need to do... reduced by about 90% of the testing." — Dr. Gavin White [22:47]

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Applications in the Automotive Industry

Gavin outlines how automotive OEMs utilize About Energy's data throughout the vehicle development process, from concept design to lifetime estimation. Accurate battery data is crucial for designing thermal management systems, optimizing charging algorithms, and ensuring battery longevity.

Key Insights:

• Design Process:
  OEMs evaluate various battery chemistries and properties to meet specific vehicle requirements, a process that can span 3-5 years ([24:19]).

• Thermal Management:
  Effective cooling systems are vital to prevent issues like thermal runaway in large battery packs ([26:46]).

Notable Quote:
"When you put loads of batteries together... you've got to try and keep them all at the same temperature and most importantly, keep them at a safe temperature so they don't go into thermal runaway." — Dr. Gavin White [26:46]

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Partnership with McMurtry: Powering the Spilling Pure

About Energy collaborates with McMurtry Automotive to optimize the battery systems of their high-performance electric motorsports car, the Spilling Pure. This partnership focuses on efficient energy delivery, thermal management, and rapid charging to enhance the car's performance.

Key Points:

• Battery Pack Optimization:
  Providing data to improve how individual high-performance cells are integrated into the battery pack ([28:11]).

• Goodwood Festival of Speed:
  The collaboration's成果 will be showcased at the festival, highlighting advancements in electric motorsports ([29:12]).

Notable Quote:
"We're helping them with how do they go from the cell to the pack in the most efficient high-performance way?" — Dr. Gavin White [28:11]

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Future of Battery Chemistries

Gavin discusses emerging battery technologies that could revolutionize the industry:

1. Silicon Anodes:
   Silicon can potentially store ten times more energy than graphite but faces challenges like particle cracking. Innovations from companies like SILA Nanotech are addressing these issues ([32:05]).

2. Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) and LMFP:
   Once considered low-performance, LFP is now favored for its cost-effectiveness and reliability in automotive and grid storage applications. The addition of manganese (LMFP) enhances power output ([34:14]).

3. Sodium-Ion Batteries:
   Sodium-ion technology offers advantages in cost and geopolitical stability, as sodium is abundant and easily sourced ([34:04]).

Notable Quote:
"Silicon can hold about 10 times as much energy as graphite for the same volume. But it expands a lot, so it ends up like cracking the particles and damaging the electrodes." — Dr. Gavin White [32:30]

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Educational Initiatives and Skills Development

Recognizing the gap in specialized battery education, About Energy launched Devol, a free web platform providing battery data and models to support university students and competitions like Formula Student and Shell Eco Marathon. Gavin emphasizes the need for more focused battery courses and apprenticeships to prepare the UK workforce for the industry's demands.

Key Points:

• Devol Platform:
  Offers free battery data and models to aid in student projects and competitions ([38:34]).

• Educational Gap:
  There's a pressing need for university courses tailored to battery technology to bridge the expertise gap ([36:48]).

Notable Quote:
"If the UK is to stay as a world leader for battery technology, we need thousands more highly educated battery technicians, scientists, engineers." — Dr. Gavin White [41:52]

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Final Thoughts and Future Directions

As the conversation wraps up, Gavin reflects on About Energy's journey and the exciting developments ahead. He highlights the importance of continued investment in battery technology and education to maintain the UK's leadership in the field.

Notable Quote:
"It's incredible. But also there's still so much more to be achieved, which is so exciting." — Dr. Gavin White [29:35]

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Conclusion

This episode of The Fully Charged Podcast offers a comprehensive look into the nuanced world of battery technology through the expertise of Dr. Gavin White. From demystifying battery operations to showcasing innovative collaborations and emphasizing the importance of education, the discussion underscores the pivotal role of data and modeling in advancing sustainable energy solutions. For listeners keen on understanding what's truly happening inside batteries and the future of energy storage, this episode is a must-listen.

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References:

• Transcribed segments from the podcast episode.
• Quotes are attributed to timestamps as indicated in the transcript.

Transcript

[Imogen Bogle]

Hello and welcome to another episode of.

[Unknown Host]

The Fully Charged Show Podcast where today.

[Imogen Bogle]

We'Re talking with Dr. Gavin Wine, who is the co founder and CEO of.

[Unknown Host]

An Absolutely extraordinary battery company based here.

[Imogen Bogle]

In the UK called About Energy.

[Unknown Host]

But before we get into that conversation, I need to tell you a couple of things very, very quickly.

[Imogen Bogle]

First of all, my name is Imogen Bogle. I'm one of the producers and presenters here on the Fully Charged show and everything Electric show. And of course obviously I'm extremely biased, but I highly recommend that you go and check out both of those channels once you've listened to this podcast. Second of all, I need to tell.

[Unknown Host]

You about our live shows.

[Imogen Bogle]

Next up, we're in Farnborough on the October 11th to 13th and we're going.

[Unknown Host]

To have lots of test drives, lots.

[Imogen Bogle]

Of talks around clean energy and electric vehicle topics, lots of clean energy technologies.

[Unknown Host]

On display and, and of course it.

[Imogen Bogle]

Is so wonderful to meet you, our lovely audience and listeners and to find out what you care about and what.

[Unknown Host]

You want to see featured on the channel.

[Imogen Bogle]

And last of all, I need to tell you that we actually recorded this on July 10th, so a couple of.

[Unknown Host]

Days before the Goodwood Festival of Speed.

[Imogen Bogle]

And you will of course be listening.

[Unknown Host]

To this in September. So that's it, that's all the important bits out of the way.

[Imogen Bogle]

Let's meet Gavin.

[Unknown Host]

Gavin, thank you so much for joining us today. Although I think I probably should be saying Dr. Gavin or at least Dr. White. Yeah, congratulations. I saw that you recently had to defend your thesis, which always thinks sounds like a really aggressive thing that you have to do. What does that actually entail?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Sometimes I think it can be aggressive, but I think mine went very smoothly. So after five years at Imperial I finally got my PhD. So yeah. Dr. Gavin White, for long last, I.

[Unknown Host]

Hope that you've ordered a new driver's driving license, utility bills, all that kind of stuff.

[Dr. Gavin White]

No, no, all in good time, all in good time.

[Unknown Host]

Well, you can look forward to the situation at least on an airplane when someone says is there a doctor on board? And you can say, well yes, but.

[Dr. Gavin White]

Not the one you need hopefully it's a battery plane. Right?

[Unknown Host]

Yeah. Okay. I'm sure we will come on to your PhD in a little bit more detail as we go through this conversation. But before we do, tell us what is or who is about energy and what on earth do you do?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, of course. About Energy is a world leading battery data and modeling company. Our core or secret source is that we can measure all the battery properties really accurately. We Provide that to companies, really, that fundamental understanding of how batteries work. When companies have that, then they can design battery systems, they can design charging algorithms, predict how long they're going to last, predict the state of charge really accurately. So we provide the really fundamental data to enable companies to do all their activities.

[Unknown Host]

Whilst many people who listen to this will probably work in the automotive industry or in the battery industry or the energy sector, lots of our listeners don't. And I think for those who don't, the easy assumption would be to think that you can just buy a load of batteries, plonk them in a vehicle, and they kind of should just work. And so when I look at your organization, I'm like, well, surely you have the data from the battery manufacturer. Like, why is it that you need this specific data to inform how a vehicle is then designed? What actually is going on?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, I think it's a really good question. And it comes back to, like a really common misconception, which is that we use batteries in everything today, right? Like our laptops, our mobiles, our cars, airplanes now. So, like, when I started my PhD five years ago, I thought we must really understand how batteries work. Like the fact that we can engineer them into so many products and use them so safely and reliably. We must have like a really deep fundamental understanding of how they work. You know, five years later, after doing my PhD, I think I'm more confused than when I started my PhD as to how they actually work. And there's a good reason how we've landed in this position. Batteries have been developed called what's called a very empirical process, so very trial and error. So batteries come from the world of material science, where material scientists, they mix together materials, they manufacture things and test them to see how they work. But that doesn't necessarily mean that our fundamental understanding has caught up with that. And when I talk about the fundamental understanding, it's simple things like state of charge. I think we all can relate to state of charge in our mobile phones, our laptops. We have this notion of understanding that A battery has 100% state of charge. It has its 0% state of charge. The reality, though, is when you really understand how batteries work, they, they don't have 100% state of charge and they don't have a zero. Like I like to describe battery like a sponge. And like a sponge that you can fill up with water. Like depending how you fill it up with water, you can always get an extra drop or two in. Yeah, there's no. This sponge is completely soaked with water, because depending on how you filled it up under them conditions, you can always get a little bit more or a little bit less in. When it comes to batteries, it's similar. There's all this complexity behind the scenes and the reality is that what gets presented to the end customers is very simplified, very high level. So this kind of concept that batteries are really well understood. We know all their properties, we know how much energy they can store, and therefore we can just take them and plug them into a big electric car. That's very far from the actual practicalities of trying to do that.

[Unknown Host]

That's really what an elegant way to describe it. I've always searching for these like incredibly tenuous analogies and they always end up being food related and I've had to really reverse engineer them. But a sponge is so elegant and thinking about it filling up with water is so elegant because actually when you get down to molecular level, these are not super formulaic neat structures, but actually one cell to the other, I guess there's, there can be huge variations and I suppose it's a structure that presumably they all have their quirks.

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, exactly. Every chemistry is very fundamentally different. But you're right, when you really zoom in on a battery electrode, they actually look like a sponge, like they're a porous material. The lithium is able to like move in between this porous structure through the liquid electrolyte. And then in this kind of porous structure, the lithium then also intercalates into the solids and moves through that. And every battery chemistry is extremely different. But also even within chemistries, they can be very different depending on the manufacturer. So the actual, like the type of the porous structure, the size of the particles, the size of the pores and the spaces in between them vary massively. And this is why even, even with one cell manufacturer and one model, you get this, this distribution of battery performance from a single production line. Because depending on, you know, the temperature in the factory that day, the humidity, the, the quality of the materials that went in, the consistency, you get this like statistical variation of battery properties within a single manufacturing line. So. So actually every single battery that comes up for production line is actually tested to see where it lies in that standard deviation. And when it comes to making an electric vehicle, you actually group the batteries of like good performance, worse performance together. So like that. Yeah, the manufacturing and the consistency and the material science, again, it's just ultra complex. That on the face of it, seems very simple, but in reality it's very, very difficult.

[Unknown Host]

So what made you start about energy to address this problem. At what point were you like? Seems to be a major gap in the market that I could fill.

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, I wish. I think business always, in hindsight, seems like very obvious, right? It's like, oh, there's this need and there's a problem. But I. I think this story for me started over six years ago when I was kind of finishing my university degree. I had a real existential crisis. I always wanted to work in Formula one and motorsport. I got a chance to work at Aston Martin and on the Valkyrie Hypercar, and it just didn't give me that sense of purpose and fulfillment. I always knew I wanted to start a company, but I wasn't sure how to do that. And it was actually reading Elon Musk's book. He inspired me to do a PhD to try and start a business, because basically you get three or four years, you get paid a salary, you get access to millions of pounds worth of equipment, and also academics with extreme expertise in very niche fields. So it's a great way to come up with very innovative deep tech products. At the start of my PhD, which was sponsored by Rolls Royce Aerospace, we were looking at doing these large simulations of battery packs for thermal models. We would do these simulations and then we do experiments and they would have these huge errors, sometimes as high as like, 50%. And it basically made the model completely useless. Like, the model wasn't accurate, so there was no point using it. And then I really drilled into, why is this? Why are these so inaccurate? I come from the world of engineering, where aeroplanes, aerodynamics are fully designed on a computer, strength of materials is fully designed on a computer for cars and other structures. I was like, why for batteries is it just so, so bad? And when I really drilled into it, it came from trying to measure battery properties. It sounds really simple on the face of it. It sounds like you take the battery and you plug it into a machine and then out comes all the numbers. But the reality is it's something called parameter estimation, where you plug it into the machine, the machine gives you out a load of squiggly data, and then you've got to try and figure out, based on all them squiggles, what are the fundamental properties. And that's the really difficult bit and the bit that we ended up inventing a patent for. And then that idea evolved and evolved until we get to about energy today.

[Unknown Host]

And what are those properties specifically that you're. You're trying to identify and measure?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah. So about energy today actually measures a whole range of Properties across a range of different, what we call battery models. So they cover the electrical properties, the electrochemical, the thermal and the degradation and the types of properties in each. Like electrical would be the resistance of the battery, how much heat it generates. Electrochemical would be the diffusion of the lithium in the electrodes and through the electrolyte. The particle sizes in the electrodes are very like physics based properties and the thermal ones would be the thermal conductivity, the heat capacity and then degradation would be by how the resistance grows and the capacity fades over time. So it's a whole range of properties across a range of different physical spaces to cover, basically creating like a full digital twin of that battery.

[Unknown Host]

One thing that's curious to me is that I would say that the UK is very, very good at generating ip. I'd say our academic institutions are world leading, we're less good at commercializing that technology. So actually the situation that you're in where you were working through this problem, identified a need and then actually turned it into a business, that is quite unusual. How did that happen?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, we got really fortunate actually that there's been like a government industrial strategy for a long time now to be world leaders for battery technology. And as part of that the government formed what's called the Faraday Institution, which is like a, I think it's a registered charity designed to stimulate research on batteries in the uk. So a portion of that money went to industry, a portion went to helping manufacturing and then a portion went to academia. And actually a lot of that money that was invested into academia over the last 10 years has actually resulted in a lot of the IP we've been able to bring into about energy. So it actually does come from government industrial strategy. To be leaders for batteries has actually resulted in a lot of the academic research that we're now commercializing. But yeah, it's been a huge amount of research in my PhD, my co founder's PhD, but more importantly the professors that supervised us and helped establish this company and what they've been doing for decades to really get that core understanding of batteries. And now over the last two and a half years we've worked to turn that into a commercial service.

[Unknown Host]

I absolutely didn't know that answer, but it sounds like I teed you up really well. I mean, what a fantastic plug for the Faraday Institution. And I think it's so wonderful when you see successful outcomes of those kind of initiatives because safe to say, I think certainly when it comes to battery manufacturing, the UK is maybe not so leading on that side, but in terms of the incredible IP that we can generate in other aspects, that's where perhaps we could be leading. What's your take on that?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, my take is exactly that I think manufacturing is going to be difficult because manufacturing is just a cosplay and it's very hard to be cost competitive with much lower cost economies. But for battery technology like the pinnacle leading edge, I think that is the absolute opportunity for the UK and it's something I would say that we're already established as leaders in the field. As you've got about energy in London, we've got De Cozy in Scotland that are making semiconductors for battery management systems designing their own silicon. We've got Fortescue that just bought Williams Advanced Engineering a few years ago. They've spun out a battery intelligence company called Alicia that's kind of recognized as one of the world leaders for doing battery degradation. We've got E Tron in the UK doing battery bms and battery analytics. So there's already a whole range of companies in the UK that have kind of moved away from this startup phase into the scale up phase for battery technology. So I think you're right. I think manufacturing is going to be difficult, but the battery technology and the very cutting edge stuff is going to be where the UK can play the most.

[Unknown Host]

And the other one which I will ask you about in a moment is Monolith, who I guess not directly battery related, but certainly data and AI related and that's another really cool one. So note to self, let's return to that because it's really, really cool. Okay, so you mentioned all of the different properties that you're having to model to build this essentially digital twin of a battery cell. Your background is in engineering, presumably not electrochemistry, but a lot of the things that you're having to measure there or to sort of capture require a huge amount of electrochemical knowledge. How have you, I mean is that where your co founder kind of steps in and fills that gap? How's that work?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Exactly that. Yeah. So when I, when I was starting a company, I was going to start a company measuring the engineering properties, select the thermal properties, the electrical properties. And my supervisor and my PhD actually introduced me to my co founder now Kieran over email and said that we should start a company together. We'd never heard of each other and never met each other, so it was the strangest way to start a company together. But Kieran did his whole PhD in measuring electrochemical properties and he had never any experience of doing the engineering side. So Actually it was a complete perfect match. We came together about three years ago and even three years on today we still have our areas of expertise that we still haven't figured out each other's fields completely. We've obviously developed a lot of understanding, but both of these fields are just so complex and so deep. There's so much knowledge required for both. So being able to bring two universities together, Imperial College where I did my PhD, and the University of Birmingham where he did his, has enabled us to be this all encompassing a battery technology company.

[Unknown Host]

God. What. That's some excellent academic matchmaking there. That is extraordinary. Have you noticed any difference between your mindsets? And I asked this, perhaps it's a bit of a leading question, but my take is that engineering is very kind of objective. It's sort of quite yes or no, it's quite binary in its nature and then when it's not binary, apply a safety factor and you'll probably get some way there. Whereas electrochemistry is this whole other slightly more mysterious art at times that requires I guess a greater precision at time. You're operating largely on a, on a different sort of scale. Have you noticed that difference between how your minds work between you both?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, definitely. It's something we have to balance every day in the company. You've kind of got the, like electrochemistry is really the field of science, like having that deep understanding that very analytical, like this is the truth. Engineering is more, you know, you don't necessarily need to know how it works, you just need to know how to engineer into a system. So you kind of, as an engineer you're happy to make lots of assumptions and simplifying assumptions in order to then take say the battery and build it into a whole big battery pack. But I think the beauty of what we've been able to do is take what was my understanding, which was like heavily simplified of the real electrochemistry going on and combine that with the real fundamentals. And now we package that up for our customers in a way that they get all the high level bits that they can play about with. They just want to know the heat generation, the battery state of charge. But then behind the scenes they can also see the more complex, well know what's the real like lithiation of the electrodes, which is the real state of charge per se. So, so it's been good being able to kind of have both, but it's definitely something that we were constantly kind of working in the company with, which is like the fundamental understanding versus the how do you Simplify that for somebody that's not. So that doesn't come from electrochemical background.

[Unknown Host]

Lithiation of electrodes is definitely sounds like some kind of punk band idea that.

[Dr. Gavin White]

Can be a spin out from about energy or punk band.

[Unknown Host]

So I read, I read in an article on you guys that you said managing thermal performance of a battery takes weeks, whilst evaluating battery degradation can take years. And that's obviously where your models can step in and make that process extremely quick and extremely rapid for organizations. Before I ask you a little bit more about that, I want to understand when we hear the term battery degradation, and we hear it a lot as mainstream consumers of electric vehicles and battery technologies.

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

What does it actually mean? What's actually going on inside the cell?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yes. Battery degradation is like an all encompassing term for a wide variety of effects that are going on inside the battery to decrease its performance. So inside, fundamentally what's going on is they're called degradation mechanisms. So you get things like lithium plating where the lithium will actually plate on an electrode in an irreversible way. So you can't actually get the lithium back. You get things like particle cracking. So if you imagine a sponge material, there's parts of the sponge that she crack off and break off and then they become unusable. You get decomposition of certain materials, you get side reactions. So the lithium has a side reaction and turns into something unusable. So there's around 30 known degradation mechanisms inside a battery. So even in your mobile phone there's about 30 different ways that it's degrading right now today. But obviously that's too complex to calculate and measure all the time and our understanding of them is still developing. So when we, when we think about degradation for say an electric car, we just think about the capacity of the car decreasing over time. So you've probably heard this like 80% state of health is kind of the end of the life for a battery. Where once the capacity degrades to 80% of what it was at original, that's kind of the battery at the end of life.

[Unknown Host]

So end of life for a vehicle, I should say, because they could have second life uses where state of charge is not so important perhaps.

[Dr. Gavin White]

Exactly. And that's some of the complexity is like there's no reason that 80% is the end. Like you can go on further, but it just becomes unusable for that application. So there's a lot of like actual nuance and complexity in batteries that gets heavily simplified down for like end users or engineers working on batteries.

[Unknown Host]

So if the sort of thermal modeling and degradation modeling normally takes weeks or years for anyone testing these physically, why is it. Well, a. How have you managed to simplify that process? Or I shouldn't say simplify, that's a really reductive term, but streamline that process, perhaps. And how have you made it so much more rapid?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, it comes from. It really comes back to our fundamental understanding of how batteries work. So we're able to build these very accurate, what we call physics based models, like modeling the real physics inside the battery. And when you have that real physical understanding of how a battery works, you don't need to then do 100 experiments under 100 different conditions to test every scenario. You can model and simulate 100 of them and then just test 5 or 10 of them to validate that your model is correct. So the real saving comes from being able to reduce the number of experiments you need to do. And these experiments, like you said, they take weeks, and for battery degradation they can take years. So the huge saving is being able to reduce that. And I think that's a good segue into our collaboration with Monolith that you mentioned earlier, which is on the. On the data side. So one thing we do is we buy batteries from like commercially available ones from like lg, Samsung, Panasonic, and then in our specialist lab in London, we degrade them under lots of different conditions. And then we use that data to build out some trends to say that a battery from LG at 25 degrees will last two years or five years, et cetera. And what we're doing now is working with this AI company in London called Monolith that also spun out from Imperial College, and they basically take this data, they use this to train machine learning models. And then if you come along to them with a new battery or the same battery under different conditions, they're able to say, well, we estimate that it's going to last this long. And then you can just test a few batteries under that condition to validate. That's true, but it saves you like 90% of the testing, 90% of the time. So there's huge opportunities to be had by leveraging data, machine learning, AI and trend analysis to kind of reduce the amount of testing that you would have to do yourself.

[Unknown Host]

God, that's incredible. Reduced testing by about 90%. That's astonishing. And that is the. You know, we actually, by the time that this podcast will come out, we will have released an episode on how AI is being used in car design. Actually, I did have a very, very Brief interview with Richard Alfield, who is the founder and CEO of Monolith. And I think what's so astonishing is that we often hear about AI as if it's this deeply scary thing. And I'm sure there are an infinite number of ways that it is this deeply scary thing. But there's also exists a tremendous amount of opportunity for it to be this incredible co pilot to incredibly technical minds where it becomes, okay, we've got all this data, you've done all this hard work, let's send you in this sort of direction, you can focus your efforts here and then who knows how you can crack the next sort of step of innovation or the next sort of step change of increasing inefficiency or what have you. I will link to that episode. Hopefully we've done a good. We won't have been too reductive on the whole topic of AI, but that is fairly difficult in an episode of about 10 to 12 minutes of length. So we'll see. Okay, so once you've got these models and you've got all of this information around various different battery cells, how do car makers or OEMs or anyone, I guess, who's making any sort of battery application, how do they use that data and what do they then build, knowing all of that data?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, for sure. So if you think about the activities that automotive OEM has to go through, so the first part is concept design and selection. So they're probably thinking about, well, we want to bring out a new SUV. We want that SUV to have 4 or 500 miles of range because it's quite a big car. It's going to probably weigh one and a half tons. So we need a battery that's going to have this much energy to propel it for 400 miles. So the first questions will be like, right, well, we need a battery with this amount of energy, this amount of power, this size, what chemistries will meet that requirement? Like, can we use sodium ion, can we use lithium ion with NMC or lfp, et cetera. So the first stage is concept selection and evaluating lots of different batteries to see which ones would be suitable. They'll probably then pick between 5 and 10 that they'll take forward to more detailed design. And in the detailed design, they'll be doing things like the packaging. So how well are they going to fit together? Then they need to design a thermal management system. So how do you cool that battery pack and extract the heat as it's being charged and discharged? After that, you get onto the battery software. So the battery management system. So what's the actual. How can we practically charge it? How long is it going to take to charge? Then you need to start estimating the lifetime of the battery. So this process for an automotive OEM takes anywhere from three to five years, sometimes longer. And the whole way over these years, different pieces of data are required at different stages in order to help them make decisions. So that's where we come in with these models. And because they're very physically based, their models are very versatile and can be used the whole way through this development process. So the beauty of what we do is we measure. It's as simple as we measure all the different properties of batteries and then them properties can be used to help design a thermal management system, design a charging algorithm, predict how long the battery is going to last, etc. So that's really the beauty of what we do, is giving people the data and the tools to enable them to go off and design batteries.

[Unknown Host]

And I guess it's worth for again, those who maybe not who don't work in the automotive space, that those thermal management systems or battery management systems are all about creating the perfect thermal conditions to absolutely maximize the efficiency of those batteries, but you need to really, really rigorously understand those properties in order to build a thermal management system that's actually in any way relevant and helpful, I guess.

[Dr. Gavin White]

Exactly, yeah, yeah. Because when you put loads of batteries together, so take an extreme case like the old teslas that had 5,000 individual battery cells, so you got 5,000 individual batteries that are all generating slightly different heat, they've all got a slightly different resistance, and you've got to try and keep them all at the same temperature and most importantly, keep them at a safe temperature so they don't go into thermal runaway. So trying to engineer a system that can be adaptive and can do all that and engineer it so it's really cost effective, so you can make these battery packs really low cost. That's a huge challenge. And like you say, you need a lot of data and insight if you're going to be able to do that.

[Unknown Host]

God, as you talk, battery management or thermal management system is like a conductor of an orchestra of cells, sort of carefully.

[Dr. Gavin White]

That's a great way to think about it.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, could be tenuous. I told you, I'm always pulling out the obscure analogies. So I know that you've had a really, really successful partnership with McMurtry, who, for those who aren't aware, just have this ridiculously astonishing car. It sort of obliterated any kind of previously held Goodwood record. It has the downforce on demand thing, which I think technically means it could drive upside down. But you've been working with them for the past year or so. Tell us about that partnership and what you've managed to achieve.

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, for sure. So like you say, McMurtry have this absolutely rapid electric motorsports car and in that car they're using these very high performance batteries from a supplier called Molicel, a Taiwanese cell manufacturer. McMurtry's job is to take these ultra high performance individual cells and build them into a very high performance battery pack. And the challenges of going from the cell to the battery pack are some of the things we talked about today, like the thermal management system. So keeping the battery cool, controlling the orchestration of all them batteries, delivering energy to the system. So what we help them with is that stage is how do they go from the cell to the pack in the most efficient high performance way? How do they model how hot the battery is going to get? How do they model how much energy they're able to take out in a safe manner? How to charge the battery as quick as possible. So there's lots of different areas of optimization where you're looking at. And we supply them the data to enable them.

[Unknown Host]

Oh my gosh. And so presumably the output of all of that work will appear in the ridiculous 1 million pound track car. Is it the spieling pure?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yes, I think that's right. Yeah. I'm looking forward to seeing it this weekend at Goodwood actually. So we're going with McMurtry to Goodwood this weekend, which is going to be really exciting.

[Unknown Host]

That is, I mean, you know, you got your defended your thesis a couple of weeks ago, seeing the 1 million pound spilling pure car out on the track at Good, we're probably going to have all the wonderful VIP experience that goes alongside that. You must be feeling pretty chuffed. That's quite something.

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah. I must say when I started my PhD with the goal of starting a business like Fast Forward five years, I would never have dreamed that we'd be in this position. So yeah, it's incredible. But also there's still so much more to be achieved, which is so exciting.

[Unknown Host]

So I was going to say because one of the things that we observe through the various episodes and people that we speak to on the fully charged show and everything Electric show is that OEMs are huge behemoth organizations and it is hugely challenging for these legacy organizations to transition to electric. Some have done it more rapidly and more successfully than others. And Actually, as new startups in the space or newer startups in the space, forging those relationships can also be pretty challenging. What's your experience? Been there? Has OEM sort of. Do they get it? Do they sort of understand the value that you can bring?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, definitely. I'd say OEM is actually the most knowledgeable in the space. They've been building electric cars for a number of years. They've invested huge amounts of money into it. For some OEMs, things have gone quite badly wrong with like, recalls and difficult challenges. So of all the people developing batteries in the world, I think OEMs, especially auto OEMs, understand it the best, the challenges. So actually, us selling into big OEMs is sometimes like an easier sale because they really understand the fundamentals, they understand the difficulties. There's a whole load of challenges when it comes to working with OEMs. Like, they're huge corporations. You know, often teams are inadvertently, they get siloed from each other. So, you know, you're speaking to one team and things are going really well and then you meet somebody else at a conference and they've never heard of you. So that's very common. But the opportunity is big as well. Like, 90% of the world's batteries by capacity are going to get used up by the automotive industry just because there's so many batteries in an electric car. So for us, we are so passionate about helping automotive OEMs, because that's where the biggest potential environmental and social benefit comes from, is by optimizing them battery packs.

[Unknown Host]

So you've, you've obviously got this encyclopedic understanding of various different cells. Perhaps, you know, there's probably only a handful of people in the world that have that extensive knowledge on loads and loads of different types of cells. So, you know, if ever you go on Mastermind, no guesses to what your special subject will be, but what are some of the chemistries or some of the things that you're seeing coming through that you're like, aha, this is, this is really, really exciting.

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, for sure. So the one that's going to go into most batteries very soon is silicon anodes. So in a battery you have an anode and a cathode. They're the two different electrodes. And typically the anode is made up of a graphite. So basically the same graphite that you get in a pencil lead, that's what holds the lithium. But theoretically silicone can hold about 10 times as much energy as graphite for the same volume. And what we've seen is a big shift for people adding silicon into that graphite. Now, it's obviously a lot more difficult than that. The problem with silicon is it expands a lot, so it ends up like cracking the particles and damaging the electrodes. But there's been a whole load of innovation in that space from companies like SILA, Nanotech and AT Group 14 that have engineered silicon in a way that it can do that and not degrade. So. So most batteries in the next few years are going to have these silicon anodes, which is exciting.

[Unknown Host]

I should, I should disclose at this point that my, my husband works for a company called Nexion, which is another silicon anode company. And when he first joined, he was describing, well, silicon can increase the capacity of a battery, know more active material, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But described the expansion problem that you just described. I was like, oh, okay. So like, silicon's like Violet Beauregard from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And then when she expands. And he was like, oh, fine, all right, yes, if that works for your brain, that's the analogy that works. But, yeah, hugely exciting.

[Dr. Gavin White]

And yeah, I love how you find the analogies, so that's very memorable.

[Unknown Host]

But silicon anode, are there any others that you're keeping a firm eye on?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, so there's another chemistry called lfp, which is lithium ion phosphate. At the start of my PhD, it was five years ago, it was basically written off as an old chemistry. It was low performance. Fast forward to today. It's going to dominate automotive. It's a low cost. It has the performance that is good enough for automotive applications. It completely dominates grid storage. And there's a new, a new flavor of that chemistry coming along called lmfp, where you add in manganese and by adding magnanese, you get extra power from the battery packs. So I think over the next, like three to four years, we're going to see a lot of this new LMFP chemistry. And then I think the most exciting is looking five years in the future is sodium ion. So there's a few companies now have developed sodium ion based chemistries, like sodium being just salt. So like that you can get from water, from the earth, very low cost. And the most exciting thing is it's very geopolitically decoupled. So most battery chemistries, they need precious metals that often come from like, politically difficult countries. So sodium ion chemistries offer a path in which we have that geopolitical decoupling, which I think, yeah, offers a lot of benefits long term.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, we, we interviewed the guys from Leaner Energy. And I was absolutely astonished to hear that it's not just salt that they're using in sodium ion batteries, it's food grade salt. It's not even sort of spec like special salt. And I also hadn't realized how much of an abundance we have of salt here in the UK as well. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that can help diversify material supply chains as well. But I think it's curious that you know, when you're doing high school chemistry and you see the periodic table and you know, all of these sort of sodium, lithium, cobalt, whatever, Certainly when you're 15, you don't really connect them with real world applications and certainly I didn't know at school because that's back in the early 2000s and things have transformed dramatically since then. Electric vehicles are now viable. But I know that you're doing some really interesting work with schools and really looking at how battery skills need to develop here in the uk. Are you seeing that shift of teenagers have a greater understanding of that connection between what they're learning in chemistry and how that relates to these physical products?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, I think that's a really good question actually. I think, I think so, yeah. I think like with the age of YouTube and especially now TikTok, it's like previously very complex topics can be boiled down into short 10 second videos. So I think young people today are actually a lot more aware of like how technology, like how that relates to what they learn in school and especially when it comes to batteries. Like batteries are so popular now, we use them in everything, they're often in the news. I think that actually allows that what you learn in chemistry and physics at school to now be the kind of dots to be joined to where that goes to. But there's still this huge gap, especially at university level of how you go from like your A level broad understanding of lots of subjects into like a specialism in a field. Like most battery engineers today, they, they either come from mechanical engineering, from chemistry or chemical engineering or physics or mathematics and then they have to, when they do a PhD or they start a job, they have to learn all the other fields. So what I'd want to see is at university level there'd be more course specific content on the field of batteries. Like even at Imperial College today in the undergraduate degree for mechanical engineering, there's only half a module that teaches about batteries specifically. But yeah, we in the UK alone, we need thousands of battery engineers. So I'd want to see is more of A connection from the grassroots like GCSEs and A levels, into actually getting to industry, having some courses that specifically tailor towards real needs and ultimately real opportunities for young people in very skilled, very technical jobs.

[Unknown Host]

And am I right in thinking, and I think I'm okay to ask you about this because by the time this comes out, you will have spoken a bit more publicly about it. But you're building quite an interesting model so students can build their own battery models. Have I made or have I got that totally wrong?

[Dr. Gavin White]

No, that's right. Yeah. So we have this web platform called devol which is completely free to sign up to. And on that we do a lot to actually give back to students, especially university students. So we give them like free battery data, free battery models to help them in their university degrees. The biggest use cases for that are these student competitions like Formula Student and Shell Eco Marathon, where universities build these electric race cars and then they compete them against other universities. So we give, I think we sponsor about 15 former student teams today where we give them free data and free models to help them design these battery packs for these race cars that then.

[Unknown Host]

Compete against other universities was absolutely incredible. And when I was at university, we built a model for an electric drag, an electric motorbike for a drag race. There we go. And I remember when we did the battery modeling, it blew my mind. And it shouldn't have done because I was, you know, third year of uni by that point, that batteries don't degrade linearly. It does a weird like, whoop. And then for those listening, I'm sorry that you can't see my little pointing here. And to have had that model available would have been extraordinarily useful back then.

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, because it's really simple when you know, when you know that you can actually design your whole thing around that. But when you don't know it, it's just, it makes it very, very difficult. So just some of this like very simple high level information is what we provide. But we provide it in what we call a white box way where the students can actually go inside, they can explore it, they can see the data behind the scenes. So they can actually start to like develop an understanding, like play into that curiosity that you have at university. And especially when you're younger, it's like, oh, why? Why is it like that? How do these things work to kind of like feed into that?

[Unknown Host]

That's so cool. We will definitely make sure to link to that in the notes because.

[Dr. Gavin White]

Thank you.

[Unknown Host]

What a phenomenal tool. So we're coming towards the end of this conversation and there are probably at least a thousand other questions that I can ask you, but I'm just going to ask you one. Keir Starmer has just become Prime Minister. If you could ask him for one thing, either that would make your life easier as a, as a founder, as a, as a startup, or that would. Could support the broader EV ecosystem. What would you ask for?

[Dr. Gavin White]

Yeah, I think it's a good question. There's many things in my head, but if I could pick one thing, I think it'd be coming back to that education piece because I give real funding to universities and put more pressure on to create, like, real battery skills. So developing courses at universities, but also apprenticeships where people get more of an opportunity to learn about batteries. Like, if the UK is to stay as a world leader for battery technology, we need thousands more highly educated battery technicians, scientists, engineers. So it's like funding and focus to actually develop more skills in the UK for battery technology.

[Unknown Host]

Fantastic answer. I'll give Keir a call straight away.

[Imogen Bogle]

That was honestly such a joy to be joined by Gavin on this podcast. I think it's so fascinating to see where the worlds of data, AI, electrochemistry and engineering can come together to really craft and shape this new frontier of battery development and to really see whether UK could really, really be leading the charge, pun intended. But that's all that we've got time for today. So thank you very much to Andy from our team who will be editing this episode. Thank you to you for listening. Thank you to Gavin joining us today. And before you go, if I could ask you just one tiny little favor. If you could give this a, like a comment or subscribe to our channel, it would be incredibly appreciated. It really ensures to help that other people can find the podcast and we can keep on sharing the stuff that we think is cool and important in this clean energy transition.

[Unknown Host]

So that's it.

[Imogen Bogle]

If you have been. Thank you for listening.