 Hi, everybody. Today is Wednesday, an exciting day. After our election yesterday, a lot of things have changed. My name is Mitch Ewan. I'm a hydrogen systems program manager at my day job at the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I co-host this show with Maria Tome, who is actually out there doing her volunteer work with our robotics people, helping them with their robotics competitions. So what we're doing here is featuring a lot of HNEI technology and renewable energy, kind of focusing on near-term solutions to our day-to-day problems, so that it's not like esoteric research that we won't see for 20 years. It's research that's valuable right now today. So on my show today, I have Matthew Zuberi, originally from France, who's an assistant researcher at HNEI, who's an expert, a world expert, I would probably say, in batteries and battery technology, and in particular in finding out how healthy your battery is in your car. We've all heard about range anxiety and cars running out of oomph when you go up the poly, you know, if you have an old battery in your car. And Matthew has developed technologies that can tell you exactly how old you're, or how well your battery is doing, and more important when it might fail on you. So very important thing to know. So Matthew, how about telling us a little bit about your background in the, before we started the show, even though I've known you for like many years, I didn't know you, I knew you came from France, but I didn't know what your previous experience was. Give us a little bit of background. Sure, yeah. So I'm French, and it's pretty hard to say from my accent, so I'm a ceramic engineer by formation. I come from Limoges, the center of France is the world capital for the best plates you can have. Right. So that's my formation. I learned first how to make nice ceramics, plates, tiles and so on, but we also learned a lot about advanced ceramics, you know, like the one we have in space telescopes or all the micro electronic components. So that's my formation. And I, for my PhD, I started working on batteries and the, actually in batteries, the two electrodes are ceramics. So people don't realize that, but a ceramic is everything that's not organic, non-metallic. So if you have anything with oxygen in it, that's a ceramic. No kidding. Yeah. So when did you come to Hawaii and why and how long have you been with us at HNI? I came in Hawaii in 2005. So a long time ago already. After my PhD, I was working on the formulation of battery electrodes and I wanted to experience real batteries, the real commercial systems and all those aspects. So I came here in 2005 to work in HNI on a fleet on EV we had and tried to analyze the usage of batteries in the field. And from then we started looking into the diagnosis of batteries and how can we diagnose the batteries without opening them. It's pretty easy to open the battery and do a bunch of really expensive tests and we're going to understand what happened. But then you cannot put it back together and back in the car. So we needed to find a way to accurately diagnose the cell without destroying them. So that's what our focus for the past decade or so. And how successful have you been? We've been extremely successful. And what makes us different from other people is we put a lot of material science into it. So we just look at the voltage of a battery and that's enough information to tell us exactly where the lithium is in which electrode. And if you track that, you can understand from a material standpoint, sorry, what happened to the battery. Right. So I think you've brought a series of slides. They're geared to the layman. So people like me can understand it. And so now would probably be a good time to start working our way through. Let's go through slowly enough so that if I have an illuminating question, I can ask you the question. But nevertheless, let's start off with slides now. So you have the first one. It goes a little bit of a summary of what we do on batteries in HNI. So we have three main focus. We do a lot of field testing. So that means that we have real batteries in the field. And we used to have some fleets of EVs. And right now, it's mostly the big batteries for the grid. And that's what you see on the top left, that white container. That's a 1 megawatt battery on the began. And he's been operating on the grid since 2012. So it's a long-running and really successful program over there. The second activity in the middle, sorry, it's still on the side one. The middle, we do a lot of laboratory testing. So we have a lab on Cook Street, where we do testing of batteries of any size, from the pretty small ones, cell phone size, to really big ones. So tell me what the lab is. I mean, what kind of equipment do you have? Or is that in a future slide that you're going to tell us about? No, that's on that slide. So we have around 120 channels. So that means that we can test 100 something battery at the same time, 24-7. And with the equipment, we can have a battery do whatever we want. So is this totally automated when you say 24-7? You're not down there 24-7. And you don't have the staff to do that. No, no. So it's totally automated. Weekends as well. You just run these things? It's fully automated. Every cell is in a temperature chamber, so we can control the temperature. And also for safety reasons, we have a lot of safety. So if something happens, we can stop everything. And so yeah, we test routinely more than 100 batteries at a time, 24-7 of different types of batteries just to understand what happened and test them under different applications. Some can be for storage, some can be for EVs, and any application. So if I was building a lab like this, or if I wanted to replicate your lab, how much money are we talking about here? Well, it's pretty pricey. Battery testing machines, they cost probably around $80,000 for depending on the power, 20 to 40 channels. It's pretty expensive. And then you need the temperature chambers. And then there's a lot of safety around it to make sure that if something happened, you don't propagate a fire or anything like that. So we have an environmental chamber down there. And so what kind of temperatures does that run at? We have six or seven chambers in the battery test. So we can test from minus 27 all the way to 60 degrees, or even more. But batteries don't really want to go above 60, so we missed them. Are we talking centigrade or Fahrenheit? Centigrade. OK, so it gets pretty cold there. Yeah, it's really important. And I have a study that later, battery degrades the most when you don't use them. So it's really important to test batteries at different temperatures instead of charge, because that will tell you pretty much the life you can expect of your batteries, even if you don't use them. So actually, all of our batteries are frozen right now. When we don't use them, we froze them. Oh, really? Yeah. So I should take my little AAA batteries and put them in my freezer at all? Well, a AAA is not lithium battery, so it doesn't really work the same. But for your laptop, if you can remove a battery, you should vacuum, seal it, and free it. Absolutely, yes. OK, well, it's kind of hard to do with a Mac. Yeah, like most PCs these days, you cannot remove a battery. But the old-time laptops, when you could remove a battery, I used to do that, to save my battery. So I'd like to go back to slide one, because I think there were some things that we didn't cover there. Yeah, the last thing we do is a lot of modeling. In large batteries, like. So what's modeling mean? Does that mean, like, modeling clothes on the runway? Oh, no. What do you mean by that? For the fur, a simple sailor is out there. So for an EV or for storage on the grid, it's a battery pack. And a battery pack means you have hundreds to thousands of cells plugged together. Obviously, we cannot do that in the lab. So we usually test only one battery. And then we use some virtual batteries on the computer that we, from the understanding we have in the lab, and we plug a lot of batteries together to simulate how a big battery pack would work. And it's an old new set of challenge to deal with several thousands of batteries compared to dealing with one. So we do that kind of work so that we can extrapolate what we see in the lab to what we see in the field. OK. So are we finished with slide one, or is there anything else that you wanted to point out there? Well, just wanted to point out that we mostly sponsored by O&R, and we had DOT sponsored in the past few years. And that we are working with a lot of other universities around the world. So I see Hawaiian Electric loaded up there. What are you doing with Hawaiian Electric? Well, first of all, our lab is located on an eco-ground. So they graciously let us use a little bit of the ground for our lab. And we're trying to work with them closer and closer, trying to help them choose the best possible battery for whatever application they want. So they're also looking at electrification of transportation. That's like a new area that they're getting into. So we're helping on that with that? Hopefully we will. It's still in discussion. Yeah, electrification of transportation is going to be a real challenge. And in the past three or four years, we spent a lot of time working on what's called vehicle to grid. What happened when you plug your EV to the grid? And the idea that maybe the vehicle can help the grid if there is a need. It raised a lot of question on the battery side, whether it's good or not, and what kind of incentive you need to give the EV owner if the eco takes some electricity from the battery. So we spent a lot of time working on that in the past three or four years. And I guess the effect on your warranty, if you have a warranty on your battery. Yeah, exactly. OK. So are we ready for the next slide? Yeah. OK. So that goes to the point I made a little bit earlier, is that battery degradation is what's called path dependent. Sorry, what? Path dependent. We mean that depending on how you use the battery, it's going to degrade differently. And that means that all the battery we have going to degrade differently because nobody drives the car the same way as the guy next to it. So here you have a few examples of a slide of everything that can affect the lifetime of an EV battery. It can be the traffic conditions. If you drive mostly clear highways, so probably not in a way. Or heavily congested highways, not the same usage. Same thing for the road types. You're driving a bit. Are you driving fast and aggressive? Or are you driving slow and steady? The temperature has a big effect. And also, are you going to charge your battery? Is it fast charging, normal charging? And of course, also the grid types. Are you going to help the grid or are you just charging? And that's really important because if you see the little schematic down in the middle, battery tends to degrade linearly at first. But at some point, they tend to fail really fast. And when that elbow happens, it's going to depend a lot on how you use the battery before. So all the challenge is to be able to predict when that deep is going to happen because obviously you want to change your battery before that. So how much does it cost to change your battery? I mean, ballpark. EV batteries are really expensive. Yeah, it's probably above $10,000 for $10,000. Sorry, what, $10,000? Wow, that's a lot of gasoline. Yes, it's a lot of gasoline. But usually, those batteries are warranted for eight years. So I don't think that's really a problem for EV owner. Usually, it falls under the warranty. But for an EV maker, that's a big problem because they're going to need to change batteries for some customers. And what do we do with the old batteries? Where do they go? That's kind of a big unknown right now. Recycling of lithium-ion battery is extremely complicated. Is it? Yeah. And that's because it's much more complex than a lead acid battery. A lead acid battery, there are 99. something person are recycled. I think that's the highest recycled item in the world. That's light acid, right? Yeah. Which is great. Lead is toxic. Lithium-ion is much more complicated. First, lithium is really, really, really small. So if you want to get the lithium back, you need to remove everything else first. And lithium tends to evaporate, too. Really? Yeah. I thought it was a metal. Yeah, but it's really, really small. I mean, that's the third lightest element. And that's got an helium. So lithium is really small. And then you have all the heavy metals that are also really hard to recycle. So there's a lot of people working on it. But I don't think for most batteries, there are no real solutions quite yet on how to recycle them in a large, large scale, like we're going to need in a couple of years. So we hear a lot about taking an EV battery that's finished its life on the car and then reusing it in stationary storage. Is that viable, do you think, or do we just don't know yet? Well, I mean, it should go back to the slide that we had before. And the little schematic I have in the center there, and you are here, sign. Basically, if you take a battery from a car, you are here, sign, and you don't know what happened before. If you want path A on that schematic, yes, it's totally worth it to put it on your home because you still have a lot of capacity left. But if you want path D, the battery is going to die after a few more cycles, so it's probably not worth it. So there's a lot of work to be done into developing some sort of a standard test that we should apply to every battery pack before we allow them to go on house somewhere. And you have that, right? We have a technology. We just need some funding to finalize the test and develop it a little bit more so it's bulletproof. So I think we're going to be cutting to a break now. And after the break, we'll continue on with the remainder of the slides. That's great. OK. Hey, loha. My name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii, airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii, live from the studios. I'll bring you guests. I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your co-workers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience. So please join me because Security Matters. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 AM. Please join me, where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaiianna all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Well, here we are again back from our break, Hawaii, the state of clean energy with my guest today. Matthew Zuberi from France. And we're just going through some of his really good, simple layman language-type slides. And I think we're ready to start with your next slide. And we'll just carry on working our way through the slides and chatting about them as we carry on. If we don't go through them all, I will come back, I promise. OK, fine. Sounds good. So here's our next slide coming up. So that one is to illustrate how difficult it is to diagnose a battery. And if you ask someone in the university, they're going to open the battery, do a battery of test on it. And yes, it's going to be a great diagnosis. But the battery is destroyed, and it costs a lot of money. So in that balance, it's steeped in one way. If you ask an ELE manufacturer, they want the balance to tip the other way. Because obviously, they want to do that on board with minimal resources. And as a result, usually that diagnosis is pretty poor. So what we do in HNEI is we try to find something that's balanced. So we are accurate, but we don't use much resources. That was our old scheme from the get-go to start to develop those kind of new methods. So a really affordable and simple, easy way to measure your battery capacity, your battery health. Yeah, and not intrusive that you can do with a simple battery tester and all these kind of aspects. Sounds good. So let's have a look at the next slide. Yeah, next slide. So I put that one here because I told you earlier that battery degrades the most when you don't use them. So that's actually battery degradation doing nothing, just a different state of charge and different temperatures. So you have to remember that a typical EV battery, they change it after 20% capacity loss. So imagine there's a line at 20%. And now look at in years, how much capacity you lose just by your battery standing. So if you are 25 degrees, so that's the red and black lines. After five years, you will lose between 7% and 10% of your capacity at room temperature doing nothing. So if you're only allowing 20% loss on your battery before you have to change it out, you've lost half a year of battery just by leaving it in the garage. And if you see that plot, if you increase the temperature, it goes higher. Wow. So most of the time, degradation goes higher with state of charge and temperature. So if you leave your EV park in the sun fully charged all day, that's really bad. Really? Yeah. So not good in Hawaii then? Well, if you go in a parking garage, when it's in the shade, or if you leave it not fully charged, you limit that degradation. OK, very good. So that's bad for that. It has some benefit. It protects you, that kind of degradation from doing nothing protects you against the battery exploding a little bit. What? Batteries explode? Sometimes, if you don't use them properly. But the good thing is usually what we call calendar aging. So the aging doing nothing protects you from that. I don't have time to explain how it's happened. It's a little bit of a weird change of things. But that's the only good news. But you're losing a lot of capacity when your battery is doing nothing. OK. So let's have a look at the next slide, and we'll see some more information here. So that one, I just want to show you how complex the battery really is. Because for most people, the battery is a black box. Lithium ion battery are really complex. And that's why being a ceramic stops you because you need to understand a lot of things. First, the voltage of your battery depends on what metal you have in it. And depending on the metal, you have a different voltage. So if you have iron, you're about 3.4 volts. If you have cobalt, you're much higher. And that's why some batteries have different voltage. So that's why you cannot interchange lithium ion batteries because they might not use the same elements. Oh, didn't know that. And then you need to, those active materials, so those ceramics with metals in them, usually they don't conduct electrons or ions. So they are no good in a battery. So you need to put a lot of additives with that for it to work properly. And then once you have that, you need to make giant tapes of electrodes. And then you roll them and you put them in the case. And you put some electrolytes in them. So batteries are really complex systems. And the bad thing about it is that with all those steps, you have a lot of uncertainties. And you have a lot of small manufacturing differences. And so that means that no two batteries are really like. And when you have one, it's not a problem. When you have 10,000 batteries, you try to plug together. All those little changes will influence a lot the performance of a full-size battery pack. So I understand you're trying to get your batteries perfectly matched. Because if there's a mismatch that causes like a resistance or a current, and your batteries heat up. That's, it could happen. That's a worst case scenario. It happens rarely. But yeah, you're right. The risk, if your batteries are out of sync, is over discharging some cells or over charging some cells. And that could lead to dramatic failure. So it's really important to monitor those cell-to-cell variations and learn how to monitor them and to understand how much you have in the specific battery pack and also how much that affects the performance. And that's why when we were talking about modeling earlier, a lot of that is there, understanding the impact of those cell-to-cell variations and know that change with the life of the battery pack. So I used to drive the biggest battery electric vehicle in the world, which was a battery electric submarine with these monster batteries. And so one battery had enough energy in it, they say, to push the submarine, which was like 2,500 tons, over a mile in the air. And we had lots of cells. And we had to monitor each individual cell voltage, just like you talked about, to make sure we didn't have those mismatches. So that's a really, really big problem. And a lot of the failure we saw on having for the Chinese overboard and all this kind of stuff is probably because they didn't manage the batteries properly. Right. So let's have a look at your next slide. So yeah, that was to illustrate that. But when you think of an EV, people think it's a battery. But it's not a battery. You have a battery pack that's made of modules that are made of single cells. And even those single cells, there's probably 50 layers in them. So it's a lot of material. And just to give you an idea, I put here the number for the Tesla. In a Tesla, you have 7,000, more than 7,000 batteries. And there are really small batteries you see in that guy's hand. You have 7,000 of them plugged together in a Tesla. My gosh. It's a lot of batteries. So if you look at the next slide. So that one, it's not only a Tesla problem. I don't have a Tesla picture here. But the other big difficulty with EVs is to monitor the state of charge. And now that's changed with age. And actually, it's extremely, extremely complicated. And that was an example of some Teslas that actually stopped on the road out of battery. Whereas the meter was telling them, oh, you still have a few percent. Wow, that's not good. That's not good. And if you go to the next slide, I can explain to you why that happens. So that's the way you calibrate the state of charge of the battery. So you have the black curve that's called an open circuit voltage curve. That's the potential of your battery at equilibrium depending on the state of charge. So what you do is you rest the battery. So you do nothing. The battery goes to its equilibrium potential. And then you report that on the curve. And that gives you the state of charge. So in that example, if you measure 11.5 volts on that battery pack, you are 25% state of charge. So if you go to the next slide, the problem is with age that open circuit voltage curve changes. Most of the time, the vehicle don't update it. And it's impossible to update it because every battery degrades differently. So there's no way to predict beforehand how that curve is going to change. And you can see that now that it changed, the same 11.5 volts, now it's just 10% capacity. I see. So the system is going to think you have 25% state of charge, where in reality, you have 10%. I see. And actually, I'm sure you saw that on your phone, too. When your phone is old, you look at the battery, you have 25%. And a few minutes later, you have 5%. Yeah, exactly. What the heck is that all about? That's because of that. The battery is fine. It's just the way the phone monitors the state of charge is getting more and more inaccurate in time. And you see, at the end, it falls down sharply. So then it gets accurate back towards the end. But this is that all part between 40% and 10% where it's completely inaccurate. And that's where you can see all those problems on your phone and in cars. And so that can lead to a problem of not only exactly how much you can drive. And that's still a really, really big problem. And we are working on it, trying to solve that issue. So once you work on that issue, you get your models right, and you have your sensors that can detect the charge. Is that something that can be distributed to all the car makers? Well, actually, for that problem, we patented a new algorithm that can actually do that for you. Really? And it's really simple. How long ago did you do that? A year and a half ago. A year and a half ago, right? So it's not granted yet, the patent, but it's in good way. So that's a University of Hawaii patent? Yes. So that can conceivably go global? It's available for licensing. So if anyone wants it, you can contact me and be happy to help them and explain them where it works. It could potentially solve that issue. So it's kind of almost like Gatorade. So maybe the university could actually make some money out of this invention and help pay for our researchers' programs? That would be great, yes. Wouldn't that be awesome? That'd be great. I mean, obviously, that's what we want from a patent. We want to use it, and we want that we still need a lot of research. And the main problem I see is that there's a lot of money to find new materials. There's a lot of money to deploy systems. But there's nothing right in the middle. The kind of work I'm doing, it's relatively hard to find some funding. And that's really the missing link between the two. And that's a really important part. But I guess it's not the flashier one. That's not the prettiest part, in a way. So we need more funding into those kinds of science to understand how battery behaves together. Or can they interact better? Or can we maximize their life and all those kind of aspects? So have you been talking to any, without giving away any names, have you been talking to any vehicle manufacturers? We have some, there's nothing concrete yet. But yes, we still have some validation work. And we still, I mean, you know what it is. We have the idea. We have a theory. We have some model that shows it works perfectly. Now we need a lot of real field data to validate exactly what we think it's going to do. So I have a question here. What is on the horizon? And I guess you've kind of partially answered that by saying, if you're seeking new funding, you're talking to vehicle manufacturers, is there anything I'm missing here that you think the people out there should know about? No, I think we are working hard. And we really want to make sure that batteries are a good future, whether it's in EVs or on the grid. And we're going to get more and more batteries every day. So here we are in Hawaii, developing world-class technologies that could go global. Yeah, hopefully. Isn't that pretty exciting? It is. Well done, Hawaii. And well done to you. And Matthew, thank you so much. You're welcome. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. It's great having you here. I mean, it has an office only about 50 yards away from where I work. And I didn't know all this stuff until we had the show here. So thank you very much. You're welcome. Happy to be here. So that completes our episode for this week. I'm not sure who we're going to have next week. I'm still working on that. These weeks flash by very quickly when you're trying to find guests to come on the show. But it's been very worthwhile, I think. And remember, what we're trying to do is to tell people here in Hawaii what we're doing at the University of Hawaii to make life better for our individual rate payers who help fund our university. So thanks again.