Picture this: You pull into a charging station with your electric vehicle, expecting a quick 10-minute top-up before hitting the road. Instead, you're stuck waiting 45 minutes while your battery crawls to 80% capacity. The roadblock isn't your battery chemistry or the charging infrastructure. It's something most drivers never think about: thermal management.
Every battery pack is only as strong as its thermal management system. And right now, current solutions are holding back EVs from unleashing their full potential.
Lithium-ion batteries are picky about temperature.
- Too cold? Below 10°C (50°F), fast charging becomes harmful, with lithium plating causing permanent damage.
- Too hot? Internal resistance rises, power output plummets, and driving range shrinks. Worse yet, excessive heat during fast charging can trigger thermal runaway, a chain reaction where one overheated cell ignites its neighbors, creating serious safety hazards.
The Real Cost of Poor Thermal Management
- Limited Charging Performance: Under a 3C charging rate (roughly 20-minute charging), even advanced cooling systems experience temperature rises above 45°C within minutes. While 10-minute charging is technically possible, it requires cooling systems that are currently too expensive, heavy, and complex for mass-market vehicles.
- Longevity: Every heating and cooling cycle accelerates battery degradation. Research shows that optimized thermal management can extend battery life by 20-40% and improve energy efficiency by up to 25%. For consumers, this translates into high replacement costs and better long-term value retention. Thermal hotspots create uneven cell aging, leading to capacity imbalances that compromise the entire pack's performance over time.
- Thermal Runaway Risk: Perhaps most critically, poor thermal management increases the risk of thermal runaway – one of the most serious safety risks in modern EVs. Effective thermal management acts as a built-in firewall, preventing heat propagation and maintaining safe operating conditions even under stress.
The Current Landscape: Choose Your Compromise
Today's battery pack manufacturers face the choice between three thermal management approaches:
- Cold plate cooling: the most common solution offers relative design simplicity but shows significantly higher surface temperatures and poorer temperature uniformity compared to advanced systems. This leads to hotspots, uneven cell aging, and charging times typically restricted to 40+ minutes for 20 - 80% state of charge.
- Serpentine tube cooling: these systems are cheap but cool only a small fraction of the battery cell due to design limitations. They're difficult to integrate, work primarily with cylindrical cells, and cannot handle high-density applications.
- Immersion cooling: Immersion cooling delivers 2.5-3 times higher thermal performance than cold plates with 15-25 times lower pressure drop. It produces lower maximum temperatures with fewer hotspots and more stable characteristics. The catch? It's heavy, costly, complex to manufacture, and nearly impossible to recycle - making it viable only for premium applications, not mass-market production.
This creates a massive technology gap as EVs move toward ultra-fast charging. Battery packs account for up to 40% of total EV cost, yet existing solutions force manufacturers to trade off between:
- Performance vs. Practicality: Mass-market solutions lack the performance needed for next-generation EVs
- Cost vs. Sophistication: High-performance solutions aren't economically viable for widespread adoption
Moreover, most designs rely on adhesives and foams that hinder recyclability, conflicting with EU Battery Regulation requirements beginning in 2025
The leitspalt Breakthrough: Aerospace Meets Automotive
Rather than accepting these trade-offs, leitspalt has reimagined thermal management from the ground. Drawing inspiration from aerospace engineering, where every gram matters, we've developed a solution that eliminates these compromises entirely. Our patented approach combines thermal management, structural support, and cell housing into a single, unified component. This multifunctional sandwich architecture delivers breakthrough advantages:
- 80% surface contact cooling: Unlike traditional systems that cool only certain surfaces, our design ensures 80% contact with cell’s lateral surface area.
- 7% higher energy density: By eliminating redundant structures, we achieve up to 7% higher energy density, leading to more range without increasing vehicle size or weight.
- <10 minute charging capability: Our thermal efficiency enables safe ultra-fast charging (in under 10 minutes) without the cost and complexity of immersion systems.
- Cost efficiency (€7/kWh savings): Integrated cooling channels eliminate separate subsystems, reducing part count, weight, assembly complexity, and manufacturing costs by approximately 20% (~€7/kWh savings, translating to €525 savings on a typical 75 kWh pack).
- Sustainability by Design: Unlike traditional packs that rely on foams, our cells are mechanically clamped, enabling easy disassembly and supporting emerging EU battery recycling regulations.
The result: A scalable, safe, and cost-efficient solution that elevates electric mobility to the next level.
Contact us today to discover how letspalt's hermal management technology can position your vehicles at the forefront of the electric revolution.
