A Dalhousie Research Team Helps Tesla Power Its Cars of the Future
Tesla is working with a Maritime university to help extend the life and quality of their products.
The company is currently in a five-year partnership with Dalhousie University to help extend the life of the lithium-ion batteries used in their energy storage systems and vehicles to the length of decades.
The partnership is led by Dalhousie researcher Dr. Jeff Dahn, who’s been researching lithium-ion batteries since the 1980s. He says before the Tesla partnership, the university had already made a name for itself with its battery research.
“In 1996, we started a research partnership with 3M which ran for 20 years until 2016,” says Dahn. “During that time we had some reasonably useful discoveries and developed some credibility as useful researchers.”
As the partnership with 3M was drawing to a close, news broke that Tesla would build its “Gigafactory” in the state of Nevada, where a large percentage of the world’s lithium-ion batteries would be made.
“I just thought, ‘that’s wonderful,’ because all lithium-ion batteries before the Gigafactory were really made in Asia. So bringing that manufacturing to North America was a good thing.”
First came 3M, then came Tesla
So Dahn decided to reach out to Tesla to see if they would be interested in partnering with the university for research.
“They came out to Dalhousie and visited the lab and talked about it. Then we decided to go ahead,” he says. “So in June 2016, we started this partnership together.”
The research team has three goals. The first is to increase the lifespan of the batteries. The second is to decrease the cost and the third is to increase the energy density, which is the amount of energy you can store per unit. So far, Dahn says the team has made progress.
“We’ve had some encouraging laboratory results with laboratory cells, which are not production cells that would be used in devices,” he says.
“So I would say there is encouraging progress that needs to be translated into manufacturing in the future.”
Reaching all these goals will help improve the cost and quality of Tesla products, he says.
“If you increase the lifetime, it means you don’t have to make a replacement, which means that impacts cost,” says Dahn. “If you increase the energy density, it means each cell could store more energy, which means you could use fewer cells for energy storage or for running a vehicle and fewer cells mean less cost.”
Dalhousie seeks longterm relationship with Tesla
Dahn says if the partnership is successful, he hopes the university can continue working with the company on future research.
“They had a lot of opportunities to partner with people around the world. They picked us, which I think was pretty good for Dalhousie and region,” he says. “There’s a Tesla Canada research facility that’s been established here in Dartmouth, which also a part of this partnership. Right now there are four people employed there and those are good quality jobs in the region and hopefully, that facility will expand over time and we’ll have a little battery nucleus happening here in Halifax.”
Dalhousie University’s Tesla partnership is only one example of the innovative research happening at universities in Atlantic Canada, Dahn says. Though there are some challenges, there’s no doubt that cutting-edge research and business can come out of the region.
“We’re a small place compared to Silicon Valley. The ability to raise money to start companies is not as good as it is there, but there is a lot of mental horsepower in this region,” he says. “Atlantic Canadians are pretty entrepreneurial. You look around at all the small business that have popped up and that are successful and with the Internet, it’s pretty easy to be a global company here.”