Ricardo monitoring technology aims to reduce electric vehicle battery failures

Ricardo has been awarded funding from the Office of Low Emissions Vehicles (OLEV), in partnership with Innovate UK, for a research and development project which seeks to improve electric vehicle battery life, performance and resilience.

Green economic recovery programmes across Europe are seeking to support vehicle manufacturers to accelerate the consumer adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles.  From its experience in R&D programmes on connected vehicle platforms, such as its ConnectHEV technology demonstrator, Ricardo understands the power of digital services to extract insights from large datasets which are generated by connected vehicle fleets. The company’s vision is for advanced monitoring and prognostics services to reduce electric vehicle battery failures in the field and extend battery life, which is the focus of the research announced today.

Running for six months, the project has received £112,000 in funding and has three key objectives. The first is the development of a test platform for monitoring and prognostics of battery health, which will form part of a connected battery management system. Secondly, the project aims to investigate novel hybrid physics-based/data-driven prognostics algorithms for battery health management. The third objective is to derive calibration updates for the battery management system from the physics based/data-drive prognostics algorithm; these can then be applied via software-over-the-air.

In order to undertake the research, the Ricardo team will develop tools to virtually represent vehicle fleets; these virtual fleets will provide data for the connected battery management system test platform. The team will address information, data and software flows to and from the battery system, while also focusing on battery monitoring and prognostics algorithm development.

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