Dr Hyeon-woo Son and his team develop aluminium alloy through new mechanism to improve thermal stability of EVs

According to a recent report, Dr Hyeon-woo Son and his research team from the Department of Aluminum in the Advanced Metals Division at KIMS have unveiled an aluminium alloy specially made to improve the thermal stability of electric vehicles. 

They adopted a new mechanism for the alloy production by which the nanostructures inside aluminium alloys work and proved to have improved thermal stability by up to 140 per cent. The alloy also contains trace elements that delay the thermal deterioration of enclosure materials caused by heat generation from the battery, leading to a high risk of accidents as electric vehicles age.

Dr Hyeon-woo Son and his team started by establishing a database with dozens of trace elements and analysing nanostructures through state-of-the-art techniques such as transmission electron microscopy and 3D atom probe tomography. With the help of these techniques, they could confirm that these trace elements could improve thermal stability. 

The electric vehicle battery enclosure market is expected to reach a value of US$863.3 million by 2029, growing at an average annual rate of 8.4 per cent from US$464.9 million in 2020. 

Dr Hyeon-woo Son and his team conducted this electric vehicle thermal stability research as part of the fundamental project of the Korea Institute of Materials Science and the National Laboratory (N-Lab) project. Following this fundamental research project on aluminium alloy manufacturing technology with thermal stability, the team is now working on advancing the technology through applied research and sharing it with domestic aluminium battery enclosure material manufacturers.