Engineer receives $2.2 million grant to develop EV battery technology

A University of Missouri engineer has received a $2.2 million grant from the US DOE to develop manufacturing technology that will help produce materials necessary for lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles.

The grant will allow Yangchuan Xing, a professor of chemical engineering in the MU College of Engineering, to develop his proposed manufacturing technology over the course of the next three years.

The technology Xing and his research team are developing lowers the cost of materials to produce lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. It uses a flame to burn chemical compounds called precursors when sprayed through a specially created nozzle. The result is a powder of metal oxides that are eventually used in lithium-ion batteries. Xing is currently working to patent the new chemical precursors and nozzle technology. The compounds also use green biomass materials, making them environmentally friendly.

“While the main benefit is to drive down the cost of environmentally friendly automobiles, the additional bonus will be felt in the job market. Hopefully, we’ll develop it into a large-scale, production-scale pilot within three years and eventually go commercial.

“Our research team is partnering with EaglePicher Technologies, LLC, in Joplin to test the material creation process and the batteries the plant will eventually produce,” Xing said.

The projects selected by the DOE were divided into two categories, with Xing’s proposal one of 16 chosen in the ‘Critical Technologies to meet the Electric Vehicles (EV) Everywhere Challenge’. The challenge’s goal is to make electric vehicles as inexpensive to purchase and maintain as gasoline-powered vehicles by 2022.