Chimera: an intelligent battery management architecture for next-generation electric vehicle batteries using multiple cell chemistries

Across all electric vehicle applications - including fully battery powered electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids and fuel cell variants - the battery is critical to overall vehicle cost and performance, especially over the full lifecycle. However, despite Lithium-ion continuing to dominate the EV domain, no single cell chemistry is optimised across all of the battery characteristics targeted by vehicle manufacturers, including:

* Energy density
* Power and impulse resilience
* Operating temperature range
* Cycle life
* Susceptibility to thermal runaway
* Cost

Electric vehicle batteries based on single chemistries therefore cannot reconcile the conflicting requirements for size, power and operational temperature versus predictability, lifespan and cost. With safety the underlying priority, the resulting design compromises inevitably impact performance, with increasing reliance on cells with high rare earth content (e.g. Cobalt). This presents significant barriers to OEM electrification programmes and end-user adoption.

In response, Upgrade Technology Engineering are developing a novel battery management system with potential to practically integrate multiple cell chemistries within a composite battery module: the Multi-Chemistry Battery (MCB). With each cell chemistry selected to mitigate the others' weaknesses across all key metrics, MCB unlocks a significant UK supply chain opportunity by overcoming challenges of balancing chemistries and power regulation.

Now Upgrade Technology Engineering, with Cranfield and ASPIRE Engineering target the hardware and model-driven embedded software developments to realise a full-scale modular prototype, as the basis to prove hardware switching scalability to multiple chemistries and support UK supply chain engagements.