The battery sector is turning to artificial intelligence for clues on how to improve recharging rates without increasing the degradation of lithium-ion batteries.

Last month, a team from Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Toyota Research Institute published findings from battery testing aimed at cutting electric-vehicle charging times down to 10 minutes. The research, published in Nature, revealed how artificial intelligence could speed up the testing process required for novel charging techniques.

The researchers wrote a program that predicted how batteries would respond to different charging approaches and was able to cut the testing process from almost two years to 16 days, Stanford reported. The technique was used to evaluate 224 possible high-cycle-life charging processes in just over two weeks, the researchers said.

"An expensive bottleneck in battery research"

The research effort has been in progress for at least three years. In 2017, the Toyota Research Institute committed $35 million to artificial intelligence battery research, initially focusing on new materials.

Last year, the research partners claimed artificial intelligence could help predict the useful life of lithium-ion batteries to within 9 percent of the actual life cycle of the products.

“The standard way to test new battery designs is to charge and discharge the cells until they die,” co-lead author Peter Attia, now of Tesla but then a Stanford doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering, said in a press release at the time.

“Since batteries have a long lifetime, this process can take many months and even years. It’s an expensive bottleneck in battery research.”

Independent of these efforts, a Canadian firm called GBatteries is using artificial intelligence in a bid to cut lithium-ion battery charging times down to five minutes. The company has succeeded in recharging an electric scooter battery in less than 10 minutes.

The main challenge with extremely fast charging is that it heats up and degrades the battery, GBatteries co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer Tim Sherstyuk told GTM.

The rates that can be achieved with today’s fast-charging technology, which are slow by gas-station filling standards, are “already problematic” for batteries, he said.

Are high-intensity charging "pulses" the way forward?

Most fast-charging initiatives focus on novel chemistries that won’t degrade easily, Sherstyuk said. GBatteries, meanwhile, uses artificial intelligence to monitor the state of the battery as it is charging.

Once the impedance of the battery reaches a critical level, the GBatteries algorithm pauses charging long enough to avoid irreversible damage. This allows charging to proceed in a series of high-intensity pulses at a rate much faster than is possible with traditional methods.

The GBatteries technology works for small batteries and has been demonstrated on power tools, cutting charging times from between 30 to 60 minutes down to 11. But scaling it up to cope with an electric vehicle battery pack is “going to take a while,” said Sherstyuk.

Even if artificial intelligence can help crack the means to charge electric vehicles as quickly as you now fill your tank with gas, it will take a while for the auto industry to incorporate the technology into the mainstream. The time horizon is years, not months.

Nevertheless, there is plenty of industry interest in tackling the problem.

“Charging time is usually the fourth concern that people raise when considering to go electric or not, after upfront cost, range of the vehicle and where [to] charge,” said Aaron Fishbone, director of communications at GreenWay, which operates a fast-charging network across Eastern Europe.

“So, while not a top-tier issue, it’s still one raised by many people.”

GBatteries’ pulse charging “will require a lot more testing” before it might be considered appropriate for the 50+ kilowatt power ratings required for electric vehicles, Fishbone said. In the meantime, high-power recharging is already reducing the time it takes to charge a battery.

Although there are not yet many cars that can take them, a 150-kilowatt charger can add 100 kilometers (62 miles) of range to an electric vehicle within a little over seven minutes, Fishbone said.

“Nonetheless, anything which can speed up charging time without degrading battery life is a welcome development and can lead to other innovations which push the whole industry."