Size & weight reduction of cell and packaging of batteries system, integrating lightweight and functional materials, innovative thermal management and safe and sustainable by design approach (Batt4EU Partnership)

ExpectedOutcome:

Widespread electrification of mobile applications is necessary to achieve the goals of the European Green Deal. A competitive European battery value chain will have to deliver highly performant and safe battery systems in order to enable the necessary uptake of electrified mobility applications.

This topic focuses on delivering a safe and sustainable by design approach for batteries reduced in size and weight which will deliver the performance necessary for mobile applications. The objective is to ruggedise energy storage packs by enlarging the environmental and operational conditions in which they can operate, while maintaining a high level of performance and achieving a reduction in the size and weight of the battery pack.

Successful projects are expected to deliver on both following points:

• An increase of the net useful mass and volumetric energy density of the battery system between 10% and 30% compared to the state-of-the-art battery systems.
• The improvement of the safety by design measures throughout the battery lifetime and during operation.

Projects are furthermore expected to deliver innovative thermal management to

• Increase performance over the complete operational conditions
• Enable fast charging requirements 10%-80% in 10 minutes maximum.

The solutions should be demonstrated and validated at application level and should comply with all relevant standards (performance and safety). They are also encouraged to contribute to standardisation of measures for safe thermal management.

Scope:

Projects should achieve size and weight reduction by integrating different technologies such as:

• Integration of advanced cell technologies/generations, sensing technologies,
• The use of lightweight and multi-functional materials (including, but not limited to, the use of nanomaterials) that are safe and sustainable by design in alignment with Commission Recommendation (EU/2022/2510) and lightweight structures for battery casing.
• Improvement of the cell to system ration by adopting innovative packaging approaches to enable smart battery cell concepts. Approaches to reduce the complexity of HV and BMS architecture and substitution by alternatives.

To reach those targets, improvements in both components in the cell and in the pack will be considered.

Proposals are expected to also address innovations in the manufacturing processes that result in size and weight reduction of the packs.

In addition, projects are expected to improve battery performance and safety by demonstrating innovative thermal management systems, which enhance fast charging capability or high-power application during operational lifetime (heating and cooling).

Finally, projects should enhance the safety throughout the full battery lifetime and for failure conditions by developing and demonstrating safe by design measures, for example such as:

• Thermal propagation measures.
• Fire retardant properties.
• Mechanical properties ameliorations.
• Reliability, default propagation/thermal runaway modelisation and simulation.

The effectiveness of safety measures should be demonstrated by simulation at pack level.

The projects are to focus on the battery system level, i.e., on the integration of battery cells into a battery system (e.g., a battery pack), considering mechanical, electrical and thermal aspects.

The integration of battery systems into larger systems of application (e.g., into vehicles structure) can be part of scope (e.g. cell to casing integration) as long as it can be demonstrated as a possibility to reduce overall packaging space, battery weight and battery performance improvement.

All solutions are expected to consider optimal design for manufacturing, end of life management and LCA analysis and disassembly.

The Commission initiative for Safe and Sustainable by Design^[1] will set a framework for assessing safety and sustainability of chemicals and materials and which should be considered as a reference in the proposal.

Plans for the exploitation and dissemination of results for proposals submitted under this topic should include a strong business case and sound exploitation strategy, as outlined in the introduction to this Destination. The exploitation plans should include preliminary plans for scalability, commercialisation, and deployment (feasibility study, business plan) indicating the possible funding sources to be potentially used (in particular the Innovation Fund).

In order to achieve the expected outcomes, international cooperation is encouraged, in particular with the USA.

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership on Batteries (Batt4EU). As such, projects resulting from this topic will be expected to report on the results to the European Partnership on Batteries (Batt4EU) in support of the monitoring of its KPIs.

Specific Topic Conditions:

Activities are expected to achieve TRL 6-7 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

[1]See documents defining the SSbD framework and criteria on: https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/research-area/industrial-research-and-innovation/key-enabling-technologies/advanced-materials-and-chemicals_en