Hyundai Partners With IonQ to Enhance Its Electric Cars’ Lithium Battery Range

Hyundai Stays Committed to Increasing Its Sales in the Electric Car Market. Recently, the Manufacturer Closed a Partnership with IonQ for the Production of Lithium Batteries Using Quantum Computers

Hyundai has partnered with IonQ, a company focused on quantum computing, with the aim of enhancing its lithium battery technology for its electric car models. In an announcement released on Wednesday (19), the two companies committed to searching for components that improve lithium batteries and their charging and discharging cycles, as well as capacity, durability, and safety. According to Peter Chapman, president and CEO of IonQ, the efficiency of the component is one of the most promising emerging areas where quantum computing can deliver positive results.

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Hyundai and IonQ Can Simulate Chemical Reactions Without Building Lithium Batteries

Simulating the energy and structure of lithium oxide, the South Korean automaker plans to build, from the partnership with IonQ, the largest lithium battery chemistry model for electric cars on a quantum computer.

The premise of the agreement is a research project aimed at exploring new variational quantum algorithms to study lithium compounds and the chemical reactions involved in the components. Thus, Hyundai and IonQ can simulate the chemical reactions occurring inside prototype batteries without the need to build a physical model.

A variational quantum algorithm runs partially on a classical computer and partially on a quantum computer. According to information from IBM, while the classical computer varies experimental parameters that control the preparation of a quantum state, the quantum computer prepares that state and calculates its properties. For now, the companies are working on executing a chemical model to simulate 14 electrons of lithium dioxide in a prototype battery.

Quantum Computing May Bring Benefits Beyond Batteries for Electric Cars

In addition to lithium batteries for electric cars, IonQ’s CEO also claims that quantum computing will bring other benefits to Hyundai in other areas of the automotive sector, such as material durability and fuel cells.

According to the executive, quantum machine learning applications can be used to improve training time for autonomous vehicles and solve basic problems related to storage, predictive maintenance, and much more.

More challenging optimization problems, such as routing and multi-channel logistics, are on the R&D lists of manufacturers. The partnership with IonQ is part of Hyundai’s strategy, which aims to increase the sale of electric vehicles by 2025, as well as enhance management of climate change. The strategy has four focus areas: electric cars, autonomous driving technology, urban air mobility, and hydrogen fuel cells.

Brazilians Discover Way to Improve Lithium-Oxygen Batteries

Brazilian researchers are making progress in creating the catalysts necessary for optimizing lithium-oxygen batteries. Such components stand out for their ability to store more energy than conventional ones, but their cyclability, or the number of recharges the component allows, defining its lifespan, still needs to be improved.

According to Gustavo Doubek, a professor at Unicamp and CINE, the work contributes to the construction of a battery with better cycle efficiency, without the need for high-cost or noble materials.