A new collaboration has begun between an established lubricant maker and a startup that provides automotive-grade electric vehicle batteries.
BP’s Castrol announced last week a partnership with Xing Mobility “to further develop its immersion cooling battery technology, offering unprecedented power and safety for the rapidly growing electric vehicle market,” the oil major said in a news release.
The company has forged many such collaborations in the last couple of years. In 2020, Castrol started partnerships with such EV carmakers as Jaguar in the United Kingdom and with Vattenfall, a Swedish state-owned power company that also builds charging stations.
Based in Tapiei, Taiwan, Xing was founded in 2015 and develops immersion cooling lithium-ion battery technology. It provides automotive-grade systems to early adopters of the technology with direct immersion of widely available lithium-ion battery cells in a thermal e-fluid.
Castrol told Lubes’n’Greases that its thermal e-fluids have been specially formulated to keep immersed electric vehicle battery systems at their optimal temperature during operation and under high charge and discharge rates.
“The fluid has been formulated to be stable over the entire battery temperature operating range, ensuring long battery and system life,” a company spokesperson said.
“In addition, the product’s low viscosity combined with superior thermal and dielectric properties offer efficient operation of electric vehicle batteries and the associated sub-systems, such as invertors, on-board chargers, DC/DC converters. Also, the fluid has been designed to be readily recycled at the end of life.”
The thermal e-fluids are designed to be used in a wide range of immersion-cooled battery systems produced by car manufacturers and battery system manufacturers. “It can be used in battery packs containing cylindrical, pouch and prismatic cells in both on-road and off-road applications,” the spokesperson said.
Castrol recently launched a line of e-fluids under the Castrol On brand, which includes transmission fluids, greases and coolants that are used in EVs across land, sea and space. According to the company, Castrol e-greases help keep NASA’s $820 million InSight Mars Lander working in the unforgiving conditions on the Red Planet.
It sees the partnership with Xing as one of many it is forging “to ensure its lubricants deliver what drivers want: to go farther on a single charge, enable longer life of transmission and component parts and ensure long lasting battery health.”
Royce YC Hong, the co-founder and CEO of Xing, praised this collaboration. “Forming a strong partnership with Castrol not only brings world leading fluid expertise to our company that greatly advances our development, but also helps us to provide ultra-fast charging EV battery systems to more of the world’s automakers.”
Castrol said it was committed to innovation and wanted to work with “true pioneers in this field to accelerate low carbon mobility.”
“We think this partnership with Xing Mobility will allow us to learn from each other’s expertise and co-engineer exceptional market leading products that improve battery system performance and drive the electric vehicle market forward,” said Rebecca Yates, the company’s vice president for advanced mobility and industrial products.
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