Abstract
The trend in electric vehicles development, EV, and its engines is increasingly depending on the energy storage resources. Among the different components, parts and subsystems involved in the ensemble of the new kind of vehicle, the battery being a current energy storage system seems to be critical as economic and technical performance driver of the final result. In fact it is the energy storage system the key element for the extra cost an electric vehicle should pay for (1)(2). Therefore, trying to discern from many different alternatives and moreover, to have a clue of which materials and technologies, is very relevant either for investors and manufacturers. Even for tier 1 providers in order to shape their strategies and adopt the less risky positions in the midterm.
Innovation in this element is a must to overcome present limitations in efficient batteries, however with shorter lifecycles the industry demand to innovate with less risk. In the present time, innovation is increasingly dependent on critical new knowledge and new science access (3). It turns out that such new knowledge is increasingly multidisciplinary and distributed across multiple fields. That usually means digging across large and varied volumes of scientific and technology production which contrast with the reduced time available for analysis and comprehension (4). Therefore, to identify on time weak signals and to know what emerging technologies from which industries are increasingly shaping the future of batteries for electric drives is strategic for the industry yet is increasingly difficult.
The increasing progress of the information technology applied to knowledge brings several advantages to the information – time conflict. Among different strategies of information technologies to analyze text, two techniques are worth to mention and will be applied in the present paper, i.e. tech mining and syntactic-semantics By means of such advanced techniques, the authors have analyzed and mined the recent literature regarding batteries for the electric vehicle and specially the materials which conform such energy storage systems. Tech mining and syntactic-semantics may in short time and even for the no top experts, to disclose main trends, promising technologies and weak signals that can disrupt the electric energy storage current vision. Elements as new possible functionalities performed by the current and future technologies have also been explored and discussed in the paper. For each of the new functionalities, finding current solutions from different industries is also of interest in disclosing the future technologies. Existing and nascent collaborations among science and companies in materials, structures, nanoparticles and nanostructures related to batteries and energy storage also help to understand the promising key approaches and movements.
Tech mining (3) is a discipline involved in applying information tools to count, interrelate and to analyze science and technology information to understand changing and emerging technologies. Tools for tech mining do help first to ascertain and qualify the set of data to analyze and second to extract and to elucidate trends, relationships, hidden colleges and weak signals from a vast database of scientific articles. In the present paper a database of near to eight thousands records of Thomson’s ISI WOS has been analyzed.
Syntactic-semantics is the information technology tool evolution of the TRIZ methodology derived from the functions elements, pieces and materials and energies, play to conform a system. Such technology allows using techniques as mereology, anaphora resolution to complement the syntactic-semantics approach, identifying functions, relationships as well as direct answers to questions. For the present work, a database of sixty million patent documents as well as an extensive processing of hundreds of scientific articles from ScienceDirect Elsevier’s database.
TRIZ (5), a Russian acronym standing for theory of inventive solving problem is currently a discipline researching the birth and evolution of technical systems and the origin of syntactic-semantics also known as semantic TRIZ. Heuristically originated from the analysis of hundred thousands of patents, TRIZ bring some guidelines to understand latest advancements in lithium based batteries, which complement the usage of the text analysis techniques.
Interpreting the results of the trends after a rigorous tracking of most of the technical and scientific activities across distributed fields may bring a significant advantage in the midterm by advancing possible opportunities and threats.
Keywords: batteries; tech-mining; syntactic-semantics; triz ; electric vehicle