In a series of visits to private companies, Hon. Owen Bonnici, Malta’s Minister for Research, Innovation and post-COVID-19 Strategy, paid a visit to ABERTAX Technologies Ltd.
The visit served as a good opportunity to demonstrate the research capacity of the company, including the existing research collaboration with the University of Malta. One of these projects is NEVAC – Novel Evaporative Cooling for Lithium-Ion Batteries, a Euro 200,000 research project funded through the Malta Council for Science and Technology.
Lithium-Ion batteries are the most common energy storage devices and are used to power a range of appliances ranging from mobile phones, laptop computers and electric vehicles. However, these suffer from thermal limitations which cause cell degradation and limit fast charging.
NEVAC is led by Dr Robert Camilleri within the Institute of Aerospace Technologies and addresses these limitations by developing a novel cooling method. The new technique provides two major advantages:
1) It maintains the entire battery pack at a homogeneous temperature thereby eliminating the weak link typically associated with the hottest battery cell, and
2) It provides an ability to extract very high heat rates which is currently still a major limitation in developing fast charging applications. The research has solved these two limitations and has now applied for IP protection.
NEVAC (R&I-2016-002-V) is financed by the Malta Council for Science & Technology, for and on behalf of the Foundation for Science and Technology through the FUSION: R&I Technology Development Programme.