Soteria Battery Innovation Group (BIG) is coordinating with Clemson University and the Soteria BIG Consortium members to set up a Lithium-ion Battery Pack Safety Center of Excellence. Soteria BIG consortium members will collaborate on projects to develop and implement best practices for lithium-ion battery pack safety.
Lithium-ion battery safety is a massive problem. Standard risk-analysis, implemented for lithium-ion batteries, predicts that the safety hazard of a battery scales as the size of the battery squared. This means that an electric vehicle, which has a battery that is 10,000 times the size of cell phone battery, imposes 100 million times the risk, necessitating significant safety design features that are not necessary in a smaller battery. Recognizing that this hazard will not be reduced to an acceptable level with a single innovation or individual company, the Center of Excellence is intended to be a place of active collaboration. Here, companies can come together in an open innovation atmosphere for the common good of the industry.
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At the launch of the Center of Excellence, Soteria and its partners will run a project to identify and promote the best practices for e-bike battery packs. In 2022, there were over 200 e-bike battery fires in New York City doubled from 2021. To kick off the project, interns from the Clemson University Automotive Engineering Department will disassemble dozens of e-bike battery packs, identify the best safety practices and create safety guidelines that can then be published to better serve the industry.
The Clemson University Automotive Engineering Department is a stone’s throw from the new Soteria Center of Excellence, providing many opportunities for collaboration with Clemson graduate students to serve as project managers.
“The CU-ICAR campus is the perfect location for the highly collaborative Center that we envision. Clemson’s faculty and graduate students provide a wealth of knowledge that will serve the lithium-ion battery industry in many ways. I’m looking forward to progress that will be made when we apply their abilities towards the common goal of creating a solution for the battery safety problem that currently exists,” said Brian Morin, CEO and co-founder of Soteria.
SOURCE: PR Newswire