SMART BATTERY

Li-Ion batteries are deployed at exponential rate, as the first thresholds of competitive energy cost and acceptable safety and performance have been recently achieved. Due to the reduced and unpredictable life-time and large effort needed for recycling or remanufacturing for second life, the total CO2 footprint is still much higher than expected by the displacement of the fossil fuel burning.

Psychologically, there is still a general feeling that battery systems today are not reliable and robust enough to match conventional energy sources and more research is necessary to achieve this ultimate goal and it is my vision that within one decade, the battery systems in energy/transport applications will become “Smart Battery” with controlled lifetime and reduced CO2 footprint.
This disruptive project will first revolutionize the hardware structure of battery systems by adding cell-level switching capability, software reconfiguration and wireless data communication and secondly by using the finally mature Machine Learning (ML) technology, ground-braking functionality will be developed including life-time control and chemistry/aging independent performance for second life time reconfiguration.

The critical challenge here is not adding “brains” to each cell for monitoring and state estimation , but the cell switching capability, a device that will be able to optimize the charging/discharging current profiles, isolate a faulted cell and make the charger/load converters redundant. In other words, will transform the battery cells in building-blocks, that will significantly ease the design effort in applications raging from kW to GW. We have seen this kind of revolution in power electronics by the development of power modules which made the power converter to be virtually present in all energy applications today.