WAE has launched a new battery technology spin-off, dubbed Elysia, whose proprietary software package is claimed to substantially boost the range and performance of any electric car.
According to technical lead Tim Engstrom, the goal of Elysia is “understanding [battery] health in a multidimensional way” so that the firm can “unlock the maximum performance through life as that battery degrades”.
Its software package is divided into two forks: the Embedded solution, which runs on the battery hardware, and a Cloud platform, providing fleet-wide data insights.
The Embedded software provides manufacturers with six bespoke algorithms that are claimed to provide a more accurate picture of a battery’s state of charge. This is claimed to translate into a better estimate of a battery’s state of health.
“Nearly always, conventional methods overestimate the health of that battery,” explained Engstrom. “The containment solution that's in place today is to put these big energy reserves or buffers that you're not allowed to use to account for this uncertainty – and there's actually quite a large uncertainty.
“That's to stop the customer being stuck on the side of the road. And if anything, this problem is getting worse as the industry is kind of under pressure to shrink these buffers and to use more and more of the battery to unlock range for their customer and be more competitive.”
For example, the new Volkswagen ID 7’s most capacious battery pack measures 91kWh in total, but only 86kWh of this is usable.
Engstrom continued: “The more accurately we can predict state of health and the more accurately we adapt the control algorithms, like state of charge, or fast charging, or state of power, the better the results, the more performance we can unlock”.
This is claimed to yield up to 10% more range, significantly reduce rapid-charging times and improve battery life by 30%.
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