Meet Dinesh: Technology Leader, Automotive Batteries and Electricals
Improving Safety & Sustainability in Electric Vehicles with Innovative Plastic
“I always want to work on challenging problems.”
Dinesh is a mechanical engineer who is helping make our cars and trucks more sustainable.
“I want to help society to reduce their CO2 footprint and to help contain the costs of global warming. Electric vehicles are one way to do that.”
Challenges with Current EV Battery Packs
But EV’s have their challenges, including today’s battery packs that protect the fuel cells.
“One of the challenges with electric vehicles is to create safer and lighter battery packs. This is a challenge because battery packs are currently made of several metal parts.”
Which poses some safety issues.
“One of the challenges faced by EVs right now is about improving thermal runaway safety [uncontrolled overheating in batteries], Typically, a lot of aluminum is used in a battery pack. But the problem is (aluminum) conducts the heat. And moreover, thermal runaway events are happening at a temperature of 1000 to 2500 degrees Celsius. In that kind of temperature, the metal just melts away. And then that becomes a direct path for the heat transfer, which then gets into the neighboring fuel cells. And eventually the battery explodes.”
Transitioning to Resilient Plastic Materials
Dinesh is working to switch to more resilient materials.
“Not many people realize the benefits that plastics can bring. Some of the new, unique solutions that we are working on are special plastics with special fire retardants. And you can mold them like any other plastics.”
“When these plastics get exposed to very high temperatures, such as what happens in a typical thermal runaway event in a battery pack, these materials become a layer of thermal resistance. And that’s what actually keeps the heat from transferring from the area where the thermal runaway event is happening.”
Lighter Weight Plastic Reduces Weight of EVs
Current materials used in EV battery packs have another issue: they’re typically quite a bit heavier than plastic.
“Plastics make EVs lighter. I use innovations to show that plastics can be a good solution to address some of the challenges that they are facing currently, and one of the main challenges is light weighting. How do you ensure that the solutions that they’re using in the vehicles are lighter? With plastics, you can do that. We typically get about a 30 to 40 percent lighter solution than a metal.”
Lighter weight = more efficient EVs that can go greater distances on a single charge.
And that’s not all.
Plastic Can Save Money, Reduce CO2 Emissions
“What plastics brings is a lot of parts integration, which otherwise is difficult to achieve using metals. You can integrate several metal things in just one plastic part.”
“And then we also get around 30 to 40 percent less costly solution than what’s currently done in metals. Now, by doing this, you actually make the system more affordable for the customers at the same time by reducing the weight in a car. In a typical use phase, you save a lot of CO2, as well.”
And as carmakers work to reuse and recycle used components, an all-plastic battery case offers some advantages.
“By integrating as many parts as possible, there’s no need to separate out each of those parts, which is a challenge when it comes to recycling. Thermoplastics can be recycled as many times as possible to bring them back to similar applications so that the whole cycle gets completed.”
Carmakers Shift to Plastic
Dinesh foresees a steady migration toward plastic in EV battery packs and throughout our cars and trucks.
“The battery packs today are surrounded with metals mainly because that’s what customers are comfortable with. And that’s how everything starts. You know, bumpers were made in metals 20 years back, and then they moved to polycarbonate and now it’s mostly TPOs [thermoplastic polyolefins like polypropylene].”
“So, this is eventually going to be the journey 10 years from now, we are going to see a lot more plastics. And this whole effort of teaching and educating society, showing how this can work compared to metals, it’s all expediting the adoption of plastics.”
Synchronizing EV Components is Like Playing Music
Dinesh uses one word to describe the process of making these advancements in safety and sustainability: synchronization. He uses the same word to describe playing the tabla, a set of drums prevalent in his native India.
“The skill sets that’s required to play the tabla, which is about combining strengths of two different hands and the drums, it’s very similar to the way we work in a company where you’re trying to combine strengths of different individuals to harmonize a product.”
“The job that we do has to be synchronized. We develop materials, but there’s a value chain of players. There are multiple parties involved, and everybody has to do their job. Music is also like that, in a way. The drum player plays the drum, the guitarist plays, there’s string instruments, and the singer sings it.”
“And everything has to work together to form a wonderful product.”
We wish Dinesh continued success.