Overview on Automotive Energy Storage Systems

The hybrid electric and electric vehicles in the next future will be employed more and more. Many considerations induce to this solution: the efficiency of these vehicles, greater than the conventional ones, the major benefits that they offer in terms of environmental pollution, the increasing costs of the petroleum and its instable market. A key component of each electric and hybrid electric vehicle is the energy storage system. It plays a prominent role on the performances and on the overall drive efficiency of the vehicles, therefore from some years the study of this subsystem has recalled a strong interest among the scientists, the automakers and the manufacturers of energy storage systems. Recently, the main auto industries have found join-ventures with the manufacturers of batteries, supercapacitors and flywheels in order to study and to produce advanced energy storage systems for electric and hybrid electric cars and many innovations are introduced in this field (i.e. lead-carbon battery, bi-polar lead acid battery, thin film metal battery, supercabattery, Li-poly and so on). All these attentions justify the aim of this paper that is to illustrate a comprehensive state of the art on the main energy storage systems suitable for electric and hybrid electric vehicles, introducing also the most recent innovations on this important subsystem and the next goals to earn.