GM has announced a feature standard in its Ultium-based EVs that captures and repurposes waste energy from the battery. Through the Ultium Platform's energy recovery system, this waste energy helps increase a vehicle's range, reduce battery energy needed for heating, increase charging speed, and even enable sportier driving.
With this technology, the system recovers and stores waste heat generated from the batteries, power electronics, and other propulsion components in the EV. Further, it also captures and uses humidity from both inside and outside the vehicle, including body heat from passengers.
The Ultium Platform can then deploy energy stored through the recovery process to heat the cabin more quickly in cold weather than comparable systems found in vehicles with an internal combustion engine.
These energy recovery capabilities reduce the need to power heating and other functions from energy stored in the battery, which provides GM's EVs with as much as 10 percent more range, potentially allowing more power and range than vehicles with similarly sized batteries without energy recovery capabilities.
With its active heating capabilities, Ultium vehicles can also potentially charge more efficiently by warming up the batteries before charging.
On the other hand, in GMC HUMMER EV, the energy recovery system precools the propulsion system to help the all-electric super-truck accelerate from 0-60 mph in approximately 3 seconds.
"Having a ground-up EV architecture gives us the freedom to build in standard features like Ultium's energy recovery capabilities," said Doug Parks, GM executive vice president, Global Product Development, Purchasing, and Supply Chain. "This helps us squeeze more efficiency, performance and overall customer benefit out of our EVs."
Covered by 11 patents and four publications, the development of Ultium energy recovery traces its inception back to GM's first EV, the EV1, in the late 1990s, when GM engineers first developed an EV heat pump.
The Ultium energy recovery will be available on all current Ultium vehicles and planned for future Ultium vehicles, according to a press statement from the company.
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