3 research outputs found
Evaluation of the impact of repurposing used electric vehicle batteries for residential energy storage systems
Electric vehicles could provide a solution to several major challenges caused by the transportation sector. However, the cost of electric vehicles is a substantial barrier to overcome. As batteries make up a significant part of this cost, one solution is to create a resale value for the used battery. At the end of its life in the electric vehicle, it is expected that the battery will retain 80% of its originally manufactured capacity. This reduced capacity renders the battery unfit for automobile applications but still provides value for stationary applications such as home energy storage. Previous studies have suggested the economic benefit of home energy storage is small, but these studies also lack diversity in experimental scenarios. Therefore, this thesis proposes a varied boundary condition approach to model the environmental and economic effects of home energy storage battery reuse from electric vehicles and the additive effects of different control schemes. Some of the variations of boundary conditions in this study involve scenarios such as including solar power or the presence of an electric vehicle. Some of the varying control schemes involve repurposing home energy storage to also provide the capabilities of fast-charging electric vehicles or analyzing the self-sufficiency that this home energy storage system provides. The results from this analysis suggest the battery reuse benefits are heavily dependent on the varying scenarios and control schemes, but overall the results agree with past studies in regard to the economic benefits of home energy storage not outweighing the associated costs. However, the results also demonstrate that it is possible to significantly increase the household’s self-sufficiency and that from an economic and environmental perspective, it is far better to reuse electric vehicle batteries in lieu of new batteries for home energy storage solutions.M.S
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Thymic tuft cells promote an IL-4-enriched medulla and shape thymocyte development
The thymus is responsible for generating a diverse yet self-tolerant pool of T cells1. Although the thymic medulla consists mostly of developing and mature AIRE+ epithelial cells, recent evidence has suggested that there is far greater heterogeneity among medullary thymic epithelial cells than was previously thought2. Here we describe in detail an epithelial subset that is remarkably similar to peripheral tuft cells that are found at mucosal barriers3. Similar to the periphery, thymic tuft cells express the canonical taste transduction pathway and IL-25. However, they are unique in their spatial association with cornified aggregates, ability to present antigens and expression of a broad diversity of taste receptors. Some thymic tuft cells pass through an Aire-expressing stage and depend on a known AIRE-binding partner, HIPK2, for their development. Notably, the taste chemosensory protein TRPM5 is required for their thymic function through which they support the development and polarization of thymic invariant natural killer T cells and act to establish a medullary microenvironment that is enriched in the type 2 cytokine, IL-4. These findings indicate that there is a compartmentalized medullary environment in which differentiation of a minor and highly specialized epithelial subset has a non-redundant role in shaping thymic function