With the sale of new fossil fuel-powered cars banned from 2040, UK has made a huge leap forward to meet this new imperative goal, thanks to newly developed quantum sensors. This achievement may have a huge impact on environmental pollution as well as will accelerate the introduction of electric cars. Dr Kruger's team at the University of Sussex has been working hard on quantum sensing technology for the last years and they have just announced a new landmark achievement that is estimated to have a huge impact on automobile industry and future car performance.
“For the first time, we’ve been able to measure the electric behaviour inside a car battery from the outside to see how well the battery is working, and to identify its state of health. Until now, the only way to see inside such a battery is to open it up. We achieved this by developing quantum sensing technology. Once applied to the battery, our sensors create an image which shows the health and state of charge of the battery. Our breakthrough will speed up the development of new electric car batteries because researchers will be able to identify what’s working well within their batteries, and what isn’t, in a much more efficient way. What we’ve done will also mean that electric car batteries are more recyclable. The working parts of the battery pack can be retained, while any faulty parts can be decommissioned or replaced. This means fewer batteries will need to be discarded unnecessarily. This is also poised to be the first commercial application of quantum magnetic sensing.” Dr Kruger mentions.
Quantum sensing describes the the measurement of a physical quantity with a quantum sensor and involves measurements of very high accuracy. There is a huge number of quantum sensor applications such as atomic clocks, solid-state spin systems and electronic degrees of freedom and they are the most sensitive magnetic field detectors currently available.