From 0 to 100 km/h in 2.6 seconds. Top speeds of 120 km/h. All powered by just one battery. This is “julier”, the first electric race car to win the Formula Student competition in 2013 against cars with traditional combustion engines. Paul Baade was one of the brains behind the battery back when he was a 22-year-old mechanical engineering student at ETH Zurich. Baade and a team of ETH students spent a whole year working on and fine-tuning their supercar, taking part in races across Europe and winning numerous prizes and awards.
“Our goal was to build the fastest car. The weight of the battery makes a huge difference,” says Baade as he reflects on the project. As an undergraduate student at the time, it quickly became clear to him that lithium-ion batteries would be key to the future of e-mobility. Today, the 30-year-old from Germany is an ETH Pioneer Fellow researching how to manufacture high-performance batteries more cost-effectively. After all, electric cars are still too expensive to replace models with combustion engines entirely. And the most expensive component of all is the battery. “If we want to move private transport away from fossil fuels,” says Baade, “then we need cheaper and better batteries.”
Formula Student: a formative experience
The experience of taking part in
Formula Student
call_made
, one of the biggest engineering competitions in the world, has had a lasting impact on Baade. Eight years later in his lab in Rüschlikon, he looks back on this time enthusiastically: “You’re in the workshop and get to turn your ideas into reality; you install parts which you designed yourself on the computer. I learned a lot back then.” But there’s one question that he can’t stop thinking about: How exactly do batteries work?
Then during his Master’s degree at ETH he began to look into the materials used in batteries more and more intensively. He studied micro- and nanotechnology to gain a better understanding of the inner workings of batteries. For his Master’s thesis, he switched to the renowned Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he researched the application of a special type of titanium dioxide as an anode material. He even built a battery with a glass window so that he could better observe and analyse the diffusion behaviour inside it, which would otherwise be difficult to discern.
It is this practical approach that sets Baade apart. During his studies he was always developing prototypes and experimental setups so that he could test and optimise conditions straight away. In doing so, his focus shifted more and more towards process engineering and its practical implementation. According to Baade, those who do not sufficiently acknowledge or understand this risk wasting their time slaving away on unrealistic ideas.
High-speed coating
Baade returned to ETH in 2016 to undertake his doctoral studies at the
Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center
, which is run jointly by ETH Zurich and IBM in Rüschlikon, where he could work on the production of cost-effective lithium-ion batteries in even more depth. Alongside his supervisor Vanessa Wood, now Vice President for Knowledge Transfer and Corporate Relations at ETH, he has been developing a new manufacturing process for solid-state batteries.
