这个新实验室可以使电动汽车更加安全

桑迪亚国家实验室迷宫般的建筑中隐藏着一系列致力于确保道路安全的实验。虽然“BAT 实验室”与某个 DC 漫画超级英雄无关，但他们的工作可以拯救生命。

Tucked away in the maze of buildings at Sandia National Labs is a series of experiments working to make roadways safe. While the ‘BAT Lab” has nothing to do with a certain DC Comics superhero, their work could save lives.

桑迪亚国家实验室迷宫般的建筑中隐藏着一系列致力于确保道路安全的实验。虽然“BAT 实验室”与某个 DC 漫画超级英雄无关，但他们的工作可以拯救生命。

Lorraine Torres-Castro may not be a caped crusader, but her work is certainly protecting the good citizens of any city that’s home to electric vehicles.

洛林·托雷斯-卡斯特罗可能不是披着斗篷的十字军战士，但她的工作无疑是保护任何拥有电动汽车的城市的好公民。

Torres-Castro and her team don’t work in the catacombs of Gotham City, they’re working in the BAT Lab with Sandia National Laboratories.

托雷斯-卡斯特罗和她的团队并不在哥谭市的地下墓穴工作，他们在桑迪亚国家实验室的 BAT 实验室工作。

“BAT” is short for “battery abuse testing” and in this lab, a team of scientists is pushing batteries to their limits in order to make their use safer.

“BAT”是“电池滥用测试”的缩写，在这个实验室中，一组科学家正在将电池推向极限，以使其使用更安全。

“We work from very small batteries up to what you will have in a watch. Very small coin cells is [sic] what we call them up to, great energy storage batteries. So that also, includes electric vehicle batteries, grid energy storage cell phones, laptops; almost anything that you could imagine,” says Torres-Castro.

“我们的工作范围从非常小的电池到手表中的电池。非常小的纽扣电池[原文如此]就是我们所说的“伟大的储能电池”。这还包括电动汽车电池、电网储能手机、笔记本电脑；几乎任何你能想象到的东西，”托雷斯-卡斯特罗说。

The lab is currently focused on electric vehicle batteries, which are high-voltage lithium-ion. It’s the same technology that powers most personal electronics, just at a much bigger scale. Their high performance and low self-discharge make them great solutions, especially for EVs, but when they fail, they can cause major damage and injury, and while there are sensors to alert consumers of a threat, there’s very little time they will have if a battery is about to go.

该实验室目前专注于电动汽车电池，即高压锂离子电池。大多数个人电子产品都采用同样的技术，只是规模要大得多。它们的高性能和低自放电使其成为出色的解决方案，特别是对于电动汽车而言，但当它们发生故障时，可能会造成重大损坏和伤害，虽然有传感器可以提醒消费者存在威胁，但他们几乎没有时间来应对电池即将耗尽。

“The reality is right now, we’re looking on the order of minutes,” says Alex Bates. He is a research scientist in the BAT Lab and he says the goal of their work is to turn those minutes of warning into hours, days, and even weeks.

“现在的现实是，我们正在考虑几分钟的时间，”亚历克斯·贝茨说。他是 BAT 实验室的一名研究科学家，他说他们的工作目标是将这些分钟的警告变成几小时、几天甚至几周。

“They start off with a lot of gas generation. So there’s going to be a lot of gas that comes out of the compartment or the cell. And that can, of course, make ingress into the cabin or things like that. But the worst type of failures are the abrupt failures that cause fire and flame jets to come out of the battery pack. Passengers are typically usually shielded by the pack itself, but it’s still a concern,” Bates says.

“它们一开始会产生大量气体。所以会有大量气体从隔室或电池中逸出。当然，这可以进入机舱或类似的地方。但最严重的故障类型是突然故障，导致电池组起火和喷出火焰。乘客通常会受到背包本身的保护，但这仍然是一个问题，”贝茨说。

While EV car fires are less frequent than gas-powered vehicles, the threat is still there, especially for first responders called out to a crash. EV batteries aren’t a solid brick of energy. They function more as a network of smaller batteries within a large housing. If one of those cells has a “thermal runaway,” which is a fancy way of saying a cell catches fire, it could trigger a chain reaction that can engulf the vehicle in minutes.

虽然电动汽车起火的频率低于汽油动力汽车，但威胁仍然存在，特别是对于接到事故报警的急救人员来说。电动汽车电池并不是一块坚固的能源。它们的功能更像是大型外壳内较小电池的网络。如果其中一个电池出现“热失控”（这是电池着火的一种奇特说法），它可能会引发连锁反应，在几分钟内吞噬车辆。

The BAT Lab is developing sensors that can detect the earliest signs of failure, thereby giving car owners and mechanics a heads-up before disaster strikes. “Our goal is to do a survey of available techniques now that maybe are too large and cumbersome to fit in an EV at this point in time. But the idea is that that technology if it’s proven, will be able to shrink down and fit into an EV,” says Bates.

BAT 实验室正在开发能够检测最早故障迹象的传感器，从而在灾难发生之前为车主和机械师提供预警。 “我们的目标是对目前可用的技术进行调查，这些技术可能太大太笨重，无法及时安装到电动汽车中。但我们的想法是，如果这项技术得到验证，将能够缩小尺寸并适合电动汽车，”贝茨说。

Testing includes heating the batteries to the point that they catch on fire, piercing them with nails, crushing them with hammers, over-charging, discharging, and even submerging them in water and Torres-Castro says all that destructive work is paying off.

测试包括将电池加热到着火的程度、用钉子刺穿电池、用锤子敲碎电池、过度充电、放电，甚至将电池浸入水中，托雷斯-卡斯特罗表示，所有破坏性工作都得到了回报。

“We are improving every day. So we are learning from past, failures, and we are developing strategies to mitigate those for sure. I will say we are moving in the right direction,” Torres-Castro says.

“我们每天都在进步。因此，我们正在从过去的失败中吸取教训，并且正在制定策略来缓解这些问题。我想说，我们正在朝着正确的方向前进。”托雷斯-卡斯特罗说道。

Bates says that, if successful, their testing could find ways into EV batteries within the next few years.

贝茨表示，如果成功，他们的测试可能会在未来几年内找到应用于电动汽车电池的方法。