Soteria sets up Lithium-ion Battery Pack Safety Center of Excellence

2 March 2023

Soteria Battery Innovation Group  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.

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. This is the start of a series of projects that will be conducted, with published findings and reports to be shared at the project's end.

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. Soteria and Clemson invite other individuals and companies to bring forth their ideas to help improve battery safety.

"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.

Please contact Amy Brinson at Amy.Brinson@SoteriaBIG.com to initiate discussions.

 

Source:prnewswire.com