Those of you who’ve tried riding your e-bikes during the winter months may have experienced some issues regarding the range of your bike’s battery. Indeed, batteries, especially Lithium-Ion units, have quite a hard time juicing up your motor when temperatures are low—kinda like how some of us find it extra hard to get out of bed on a cold, chilly morning.
To solve this problem, UltraTRX, a brand which we’ve talked about quite a lot in recent months, has come up with an interesting solution: ThermoTRX. That’s right, this company never seems to run out of ideas when it comes to solutions surrounding the e-bike space. First, it brought us GenerTRX, a nifty regeneration system that makes use of your bike’s disc brake rotor as sort of a stator. Now, ThermoTRX looks to offer two key benefits to preserve your bike’s battery: protection from sub-freezing temperatures and optimized range regardless of the weather outside.
The way it works is actually pretty simple. The whole setp consists of strips wrapped around the electric bike’s battery pack. A thermostat is also used here, and its job is to make sure that the heating element doesn’t go too far by overheating your battery. We mentioned earlier that lithium batteries struggle to store energy at sub-freezing temps, and this is exactly the temperature that the thermostat switches the heater on: anywhere below zero degrees celsius. Likewise, should temps rise above freezing, the ThermoTRX system simply shuts off.
As for the power source of the heating system itself, UltraTRX says that it runs on two rechargeable button batteries, which I assume are more resistant to low temperatures than the typical lithium battery pack found in most electric bikes. Surely, this is something we’d like to learn more about as UltraTRX releases more information about ThermoTRX.
Indeed, this technology seems pretty simple, yet effective, especially for folks who rely on their electric bikes solely for mobility, regardless of the weather. At this point, however, it seems that ThermoTRX is still just a concept, and if and when it actually becomes a reality, chances are it’ll be proprietary tech featured only on UltraTRX’s bikes.
