Tesla today announced is has successfully completed the acquisition of Maxwell Technologies, an ultracapacitor and battery manufacturer. The buyout was in a stock exchange estimated to be worth over $235 million.
The deal is assumed to be in an effort to improve Tesla’s energy storage and EV businesses. Maxwell had been working on ways to improve the durability and longevity of ultracapacitors and battery cells, including researching “dry battery electrode” technology that can increase energy density significantly. This dry technology doesn’t use solvents in processing, so manufacturing equipment and efforts should be less.
Solarman says
It has been a problem for years, that electric vehicles with regenerative braking still lose quite a bit of power, due to the inability of lithium ion batteries to accept energy spikes without undue heating of the battery pack. Enter super caps, very high voltage tolerances, very fast charge/discharge rates and hundreds of thousands of cycles over their lifetime. A front end of a couple of kWh of ultra caps could effectively take in all of the regenerated energy used to stop an all electric vehicle without actual mechanical brakes doing at least part of the job. Ultra caps on the front end of an EVs battery pack could also be a part of the BMS, keeping sudden discharge or charge rates from causing the BMS to curtail some of the available current being sent back into the system, especially during braking.