Thirteen years ago, Evelyn Wang and a group of colleagues landed a grant from a relatively new agency at the Department of Energy.
Wang — then an MIT engineering professor — was working with researchers at the University of Texas, Northeastern University and the University of California, Berkeley on a new type of battery that could power the heating and cooling systems for electric vehicles. Their aim was to reduce the workload on the vehicle’s main battery.
It was an intriguing enough concept that it earned support from DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which funded their work for a couple years. Wang and her fellow researchers got as far as developing a prototype of the system with Ford, though the idea never went into production.
But the story doesn’t end there.
