Smart Battery for EV Even When Cell Fails

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Three-in-one inverter, charger and advanced battery management system for enhanced e-mobility...

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 21, 2019 – 

Whether for running a wearable device or powering an electric vehicle, battery life is the bugaboo that keeps system designers (and consumers) awake at night.

Compared to all comparable advancements in the electronics industry, innovations in battery technology are painfully slow.

In the smartphone business, design engineers spend a lot of time and resources trying to improve battery management systems (BMS). In the battery business, researchers are constantly fussing and tweaking even for tiny improvements.

But curiously, nobody has thought about integrating BMS, charger and inverter directly into a battery pack – until CEA-Leti, a Grenoble, France-based research organization. At the Consumer Electronics show last week, CEA-Leti demonstrated its new three-in-one battery pack.

Awarded with 15 patents, CEA-Leti's novel battery technology called Sigma Cells solves a fundamental problem of today's batteries, according to Philippe Despesse, head of IoT and energy for CEA-Leti's sytems division. Today, if one cell in a battery pack stops working, the whole battery pack fails, he explained.

But the Sigma Cells-based battery pack – with switching, charging and BMS features – directly accesses individual battery cells at all times. Cell-switching technology picks the cells that charge most efficiently and uses them first and avoids cells that no longer cycle optimally, said Despesse. When a cell is about to fail, the battery pack's ability to find an alternative path enables Sigma Cells to prevent the failure of the whole battery pack.

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