Zero running with CTC battery life of more than 700 kilometers, a week to charge enough?

Recently, the traffic of zero-run cars is good, because the CTC battery is likely to become the first CTC mass production car company, and the first to use this technology will be zero-run C01.

In addition to automobile manufacturers, battery supplier giant Ningde Times is also developing its own CTC batteries. The industry generally believes that CTC is the beginning of the battery 3.0 era, which may cause changes in the battery pattern of new energy vehicles, and some people think that CTC will become a new outlet for the industry.

So, what kind of technology is CTC, and what can it achieve?

What are the advantages of CTC battery technology?

At present, there are many popular battery technologies, including mass-produced CTP batteries, power exchange technologies that have been implemented on a small scale, and CTC battery chassis technology that will be mass-produced.

We should be most familiar with CTP battery technology, that is, products like BYD blade batteries, bypassing the traditional module level, energy density is higher than the original, which is currently widely used by car companies and battery suppliers.

Power exchange technology is a rapid energy replenishment technology means that can replace the entire battery pack, and there are Weilai replacement power station / Ningde era chocolate battery and so on. When the energy density of the whole battery is not high enough and the charging efficiency is low, it is definitely a good choice to change the battery, but the problem is that different car companies use different battery specifications, and the power exchange can only be completed under the premise of the same brand or the same supplier, which is more limited.

Changing batteries, some of them are like the same technical means that we used to change the battery of the mobile phone before the advent of the smartphone. However, after the improvement of smartphone battery technology, now smart phones use battery body integration design.

For the above problems, the advantages of CTC include:

1. Generalized technology, not affected by power exchange technology, due to battery specifications /standard differences, it is impossible to share the power station;

2. It can improve the mileage and bring better riding space;

3. The battery is integrated in the chassis to bring a more comfortable and safer driving experience; at the beginning of the design,

4. The battery and the body have a very high degree of matching.

Tesla first proposed CTC technology, but it has not yet been mass-produced; after Tesla, Ningde Times, LG, Volvo, Zero Run and other companies have also proposed their own CTC technology routes and patents.

Performance, safety, and space can be balanced, is the credit of CTC?

Most of the existing battery pack structure design ideas are like nesting doll design, multiple cells to form a module, multiple modules to form a battery pack, and then the battery pack is placed on the body floor. The battery 1.0 to 2.0 era is free of modules, that is, the current battery cells are modules.

CTC battery, how to achieve space utilization increase? After using CTC technology, there is no concept of the battery pack, there is no need to install the shell, the battery cell is directly integrated into the interior of the car chassis, the vertical height (vertical space in the car) utilization rate will be improved, and the minimum ground clearance of the vehicle will be improved to improve safety. Taking the upcoming zero-run C01 for example, after using CTC technology, the space utilization rate is 14.5% higher than that of the traditional battery pack solution, and the vehicle weight is reduced by 5%, which directly brings the benefit of increasing the endurance by 10% and the comprehensive cruising range of the 90kWh battery pack is 717 kilometers.

How is long battery life achieved? In the traditional thinking, improving the battery range relies on the stack battery scheme, and the CTC scheme makes the battery layout have a higher space utilization rate, which alleviates the problem of space concessions to the battery life to a certain extent. However, the CTC scheme given by Zero Run does not directly use batteries inside, but still retains the battery module, which is somewhat conservative in design.

To say that the "advanced" of the technology is actually not very advanced, it is nothing more than an iterative product of the battery pack, 1.0 module battery pack, 2.0 remove the module weight reduction and increase, 3.0 remove the entire battery pack shell into the interior of the chassis, do or reduce the weight and increase the amount of things, in essence, there is no change in the energy density of the battery, element ratio.

What are the problems and pain points of the CTC solution?

First of all, it should be clear that this kind of product that requires batteries and chassis components from the beginning of the design to have a very high degree of matching is a difficult point from the production process, and the production process is very high, and the cost is also high, if the manufacturing is unqualified rework and maintenance, the difficulty will be higher.

Compared with the current widely used battery pack, the integration of the CTC chassis battery makes the chassis need to complete the adaptation of the braking system, steering system, suspension system and other aspects in addition to the need to assemble the battery cell, so the yield in the early stage is a great challenge. In addition, it is a more realistic problem to consider, if the core components or chassis of vehicles using CTC chassis batteries are damaged, it may be a big project to repair.

In addition, this design requires the battery cell (or module) to have load carrying capacity as part of the structural part. How to securely fix the battery cell and the upper and lower structural parts is a challenge to the safety of the battery and the rationality of the structure.

Zero-run C01 canceled the box + upper cover of the battery pack, leaving only the battery tray, did not use the battery cell directly like Tesla, but adopted the integrated module, the upper cover is the upper cover with the function of the body floor, and the seat is also directly mounted on the upper cover (Tesla also adopts a similar design scheme, and the cancellation is the interior floor). Although the overall efficiency of this design becomes more efficient, it is a test of the airtightness of the entire chassis battery.

One of the most important pain points of CTC battery solutions, in addition to zero running, no enterprise has begun to really enable CTC, as a new technology, it has not been fully verified by the market. In fact, the zero-run CTC chassis battery is not a "complete body" in the true sense, after all, it did not directly place the battery cell in it but added the battery module. Perhaps in the future, it will be slowly iterated to the CTC scheme that directly uses batteries, and perhaps there are modules that are good for the initial mass production and subsequent maintenance.

summary

In the development direction of improving the energy density of the battery, the element ratio has been almost developed to the extreme, and then the structure is subtracted, the battery cell is added, and the stack volume is changed for the mileage. Catalonia began to develop CTC batteries, Tesla Model Y cars using CTC batteries have begun to test on a small scale.

Until now, some car companies have finally mass-produced CTC chassis batteries, but at present, it seems that they cannot be regarded as "complete". As far as the technology itself is concerned, it is still worth looking forward to, if only the battery cell is used internally, the mileage and body weight will be further reduced, but it needs to be faced with improved safety performance and higher manufacturing costs.