Accelerated multi-physical and virtual testing for battery aging, reliability and safety evaluation (Batt4EU Partnership)

Deadline: Sep 5, 2024  
- 110 days

Projects are expected to contribute to all of the following outcomes:

• Shortening the development time of battery cells and battery systems by minimising the experimental testing effort and thus reducing the overall costs and time in battery system development and reducing the time to market.
• Increasing the battery reliability and safety through better understanding of the ageing, reliability and safety-relevant mechanisms and phenomena.
• Supporting the uptake of zero emission vehicles and the deployment of stationary energy storage systems (ESS) through safer and cost-effective battery systems.
• Fostering innovations in the eco-system battery through accelerated and more reliable verification and validation of advanced solutions contributing to increased user acceptability (safety & costs) and competitiveness of the European battery value chain.
• Standardisation of battery system testing & validation approaches focussing on the fusion of physical and virtual test methodologies.

This call aims to reduce the development cost and time to market of battery systems by accelerated multi-physical and virtual testing. Current test strategies are still very time consuming and costly due to the need to understand the impact of multi-physical operational loads (electric, thermal, mechanical, …), potential failure modes, ageing and misuse on the safety and reliability of battery cells, modules and systems level. For overcoming these barriers, new multi-physical test strategies supplemented by virtual testing are required deepening the understanding of factors impacting ageing, reliability and safety and their dependencies.

This call complements the previous call HORIZON-CL5-D2-2022-01-07 focusing on the digitisation of battery testing. To differentiate, research activities should focus on the orchestration of accelerated testing and should result in a coherent test strategy from cell to system as much as possible independent from chemistries and technologies applicable also to next-generation batteries. Proposals can address mobile as well as stationary applications and should address and demonstrate at least following activities:

• Understanding and describing the impact of multi-physical operational loads, failure modes, ageing and misuse on battery reliability and safety highlighting the dependencies between them in order to design the most adequate testing methods and parameters. This includes deeper understanding of aging and degradation mechanisms induced by accelerated tests both on batteries safety performance and cycle-life to optimise the testing strategy.
• Deriving advanced operating profiles for testing and development of novel X-in-the-Loop (XiL) test environments for multi-physical and accelerated testing addressing electrical, thermal and mechanical loads at the same time. This includes the design of specimen mountings representing real-life conditions.
• Combining physics-based with data-driven test strategies enabling reliable virtual and distributed battery testing from cell to system taking into account specific applications. This includes developing methodologies for accelerated model convergence mixing digital and XiL test results as well as of decision-making algorithms for automated test definition and execution.
• Development of simplified test strategies reducing the number of test and their complexity while improving battery safety and reliability. This includes on the fly testing protocols to facilitate/accelerate the parametrisation as well as the testing of aged or damaged batteries. Synergies between different battery chemistry, including next generation battery designs and sizes should be exploited allowing to re-use or scale test results from cell to system level.
• Research activities should also lead to advance response strategies for damaged and aged batteries as well as should contribute to an European-wide safety classification system for safety. For the latter, the development of concepts for such a safety classification system are being expected.

Activities could be complemented by following aspects:

• Development of virtual methods to reduce the complexity of testing sample to sub-system DUTs (device under test) while full system is validated by virtual methods using the results from physical sub-system test.
• Development, exploitation, and harmonisation of advanced battery cell/pack measurement & diagnostic methods for enhancing the data depth and breadth over what is currently available. Development of performance indicators relating to battery degradation and safety and methods / requirements for correlating / validating digital models.
• Application of AI to the collected data at laboratory to redefine designed test matrix in order to improve the potential conclusions, to reduce the testing time and effort and in general, to enhance the applied testing methodology.

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).

To strengthen European battery production ecosystem, projects are encouraged to implement batteries produced in EU Member States/Associated countries at large or pilot plant scale.

Proposals could consider the involvement of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) whose contribution could consists of performing experimental or desk-top research on battery performance or safety.

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.

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