10041430TECHNO: Temperature monitoring, Cooling and Heating during Normal Operation in a demonstration battery packClosedFeasibility StudiesISCFTECHNO, an acronym standing for "Temperature monitoring, Cooling and Heating during Normal Operation in a demonstration battery pack", is a project to develop an innovative battery pack for cars and any other type of electric vehicle. For a battery to deliver its best performance over a long life, the temperature of all the cells in it must be kept uniformly at the right operating temperature. TECHNO is the first system designed to be able to do this. A conventional battery thermal management system (BTMS) struggles to maintain a uniform temperature because the battery itself generates an incredibly large amount of heat, especially during fast charging. Besides the obvious safety concern, the high temperature permanently damages the cells, and so reduces the battery life. In cold winter weather, parts of the battery --- or even part of an individual large cell --- may be too cold to operate efficiently, causing these cells to be damaged and putting strain on the other parts. The two challenges faced by a conventional BTMS are that it does not have sufficient information to identify hot and cold spots, and that it does not have the ability to cool or heat them independently of the rest of the battery. This is where TECHNO, with its capacity for active differential thermal management, comes in. Working to the requirements of industry partners, who manufacture batteries and battery management systems, the TECHNO project will create an intelligent battery module which can monitor and control its own temperature profile. Each cell in the battery is monitored continually by an array of thin printed temperature and pressure sensors, which pass their information onto a BTMS built into the battery module, which receives its instructions from, and reports back to, an external battery management system (BMS). The internal BTMS combines the sensor information to build a three-dimensional map of the temperature inside the battery. It then uses this map to determine how the temperature at different positions is changing, and what needs to be done. It then takes action, by differentially heating or cooling at the point it is required using an advanced liquid cooling system and low-power electric heaters, positioned in contact with the cells to keep them all working safely and efficiently at their optimum temperature.