Ducati Electric Panigale

Notec said:

The battery in the motoE bike is 18kwh, only 3kwh larger than the Harley Livewire, and it weighs 240 lbs. A 240 lb battery required to complete 6-8 laps (race distance). Keep in mind that the entire motoE bike is made of carbon fibre, aluminum, titanium, and unobtainium! The street bike is going to be greater than 500 lbs. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

Click to expand...

True. Somehow Ducati managed to cleave off 125 kg from the Ego. Though I don't think they're doing it at the level of titanium and unobtanium. Just look at the swingarm, it looks cast instead of billet. Also Ducati are using cylindrical batteries (1152 to be exact) so there's likely to be some dead space. Any reason for them to run cylindrical batteries as opposed to polymer mat batteries? Maybe they run cooling through this dead space?

Home with Covid so did a deep dive into Li batteries...

Ducati is most likely running Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide batteries (NMC). They seem to be the most popular type for this application with a capacity of 200 Wh/kg. However, the V21L battery pack only gets 163 Wh/kg (18 kWh battery that is 110 kg). That's about 80% of the theoretical limit of NMC. It seems if they're missing out on some packaging efficiency if they switched from cylindrical batteries to polymer batteries (like what's in your laptop) they might eke out a few more Wh/kg. They could also switch to the more potent Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminium Oxide (NCA) which have a capacity of 250 Wh/kg. Theoretically, with NCA power to weight ratio an 18 kWh battery could be 72 kg (or 65% less than the current battery).

Not sure what the pros and cons of each type of Li-ion. Maybe NCA isn't heat tolerant or can't be discharged efficiently enough for this application.

https://www.batterypowertips.com/difference-between-lithium-ion-lithium-polymer-batteries-faq/