As the global penetration rate of new energy vehicles rapidly increases, the demand for power batteries continues to expand. At the same time, traditional battery safety monitoring technologies suffer from issues such as late detection, slow response, and inaccurate measurements, which have become a bottleneck for industry development.
Recently, a group of "post-2000s" undergraduate students from the School of Information Science and Engineering at Ningbo University established Ningbo Neutron Core Technology Co., Ltd. They have developed battery cells with a 10-fold improvement in fault detection capability and a 100% ability to predict thermal runaway risks, achieving early warning for battery safety. The team conducted research and development based on the Advanced Intelligent Sensing Laboratory and the State Key Laboratory of Sensor Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Research team group photo. Image provided by Ningbo University.
"In product design and advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes, the biggest challenge we face comes from sensing technology," said Chen Xiaopeng, founder of the company and a doctoral student at the School of Information Science and Engineering, Ningbo University, to China Science Daily.
The team has proposed a new generation safety monitoring framework for vehicle operation and thermal runaway characteristics. Theoretically, it can effectively monitor and predict vehicle safety issues. However, due to the inability of conventional sensing methods to resolve subtle signal changes, there still exists a "gap" that needs to be overcome before practical application.
To address this, the team innovated in sensor structure, sensing principles, and manufacturing methods. By amplifying small signals by 10 to 100 times, they successfully achieved ultra-sensitive detection of electrical insulation, battery micro-deformation, and characteristic hydrogen gas.
Furthermore, during the manufacturing process of micro-strain sensing chips, the team found that the resistance values were always unstable, with significant drift. It wasn't until they drew inspiration from a method of encapsulating devices using a fusion sintering process that they found a method to achieve nearly perfect "ohmic contact" just a week later. This led to a nearly 90-fold improvement in the performance of the developed micro-strain sensing chips, reaching the international advanced level.
This achievement has been widely recognized, winning the Galaxy-level special prize in the 18th National "Challenge Cup" University Student Academic Science and Technology Works Competition in October 2023, and exhibited nationwide. Subsequently, they were invited to participate in thematic display and exchange activities organized by the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the Communist Youth League, receiving recognition from industry experts.
During an exchange event organized by the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the Communist Youth League, a team showcased products. Image courtesy of Ningbo University.
Ningbo University's School of Information Science and Engineering has collaborated with multiple enterprises to establish internship and training bases, jointly cultivating innovative entrepreneurial talents, and promoting the implementation and incubation of dual-creation projects. The innovative entrepreneurial achievements of students have been remarkable, with a total of 370 national-level discipline competition awards, 12 national-level dual-creation competition awards, 324 authorized invention patents, and 892 SCI papers published in the past three years.
