Car manufacturer claims to drive 1400 km on a single charge with nanoFlowcell battery
The nanoFlowcell company claims to have covered 1,400 kilometers with its Quantino car on a single charge of its flow cell battery. 1000 kilometers of this would have been traveled on public roads in Switzerland.
NanoFlowcell makes the claim in a report from a meeting held in late December in Zurich, where developers of the company and technicians from “major Asian car manufacturers” were said to have attended. The company wanted to demonstrate that its nanoFlowcell technology is ready for series production and took the engineers on a test drive. Within 8 hours and 21 minutes, the Quantino car would have reached the target of 1000 kilometers.
“On a test track, that 1000 kilometers would be covered in no time, but on the Swiss road there is a speed limit of 120 km/h”, according to the Liechtenstein-based nanoFlowcell Holdings. After the session with the Asian technicians, developers of the company are said to have emptied the car’s tank, after which a claimed distance of 1401 kilometers was on the clock.
The battery of the Quantino is a so-called flow cell battery. In this type of rechargeable fuel cells, a chemical reaction takes place in a reaction chamber, during which electrical energy is extracted. The required electrolyte is stored in separate storage tanks and pumped into the reaction vessel as required. NanoFlowcell claims to be able to apply this principle in a battery of limited size and the latest generation, announced in October last year, would no longer require expensive supercapacitors.
The battery of the Quantino is a 48V model with a capacity of 15kWh, according to nanoFlowcell. The three-phase asynchronous motor offers 109hp. The company itself admits that the necessary infrastructure for the bi-ion electrolyte is a chicken-and-egg problem for a breakthrough. The composition of this bi-ion electrolyte is still kept a secret by the company. A full battery of the Quantino contains two times 95 liters of the electrolyte. As far as is known, the claims of nanoFlowcell have not yet been tested by independent parties.