Sustainable lightweight low cost battery systems for extended life cycles (EV-Lite)

Energy storage technologies are key to the electrification of road transport which is in turn necessary for carbon reduction. Batteries are currently favoured over alternatives (flywheels, supercapacitors) due to their greater versatility (energy storage and release) and lower cost.
In order for Electric Vehicles (EV) to be readily adopted by the market place a number of technology gaps need to be addressed. Current 1st generation batteries (capacity 15-25kWh) have been over-engineered for safe performance, crash damage and to overcome potential vibration failures. Consequently battery systems are expensive (£12-16k) and heavy (~300kg), require significant resource to produce and are not suitable for high volume manufacture, thereby increasing cost of acquisition and ownership
EV Lite is a two year project which will address these issues through collaboration of mechanical and electrical design expertise in a range of business sectors, from Tier 1 suppliers to Original Equipment Manufacturers. The key objectives reducing cost (50%), weight (30%) and improving through-life maintenance, re-use and recycling.
The high level milestones of the project include a teardown assessment of an electric vehicle before design and manufacture of prototype battery components which will be tested using real world cycles and scenarios.
On top of the weight and cost savings, the project team will deliver a manufactured and tested prototype that has been optimised for design for manufacture, re-use and recycling. The project will also have demonstrated, via simulation and lab scale tests, methods for mass manufacture, moving away from the current lab based assembly methods. A small scale demonstration cell will be established to prove out the manufacturability of the design at the rates and costs required for mass production in later stages of the project. Ultimately this will de-risk the methodology allowing for investment in a mass manufacturing facility to produce the volumes necessary to meet the anticipated demand for EV’s by 2020.