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SBIR Phase I: Impedance-Based Battery Health Management for Large Format Lithium-Ion Battery Packs

Award Information
Agency: National Science Foundation
Branch: N/A
Contract: 1842957
Agency Tracking Number: 1842957
Amount: $225,000.00
Phase: Phase I
Program: SBIR
Solicitation Topic Code: EW
Solicitation Number: N/A
Timeline
Solicitation Year: 2018
Award Year: 2019
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): 2019-02-01
Award End Date (Contract End Date): 2019-11-30
Small Business Information
7690 Lampson Ave
Garden Grove, CA 92841
United States
DUNS: 080680454
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: Yes
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: Yes
Principal Investigator
 Steven Chung
 (657) 200-5670
 schung@rejouleenergy.com
Business Contact
 Steven Chung
Phone: (657) 200-5670
Email: schung@rejouleenergy.com
Research Institution
N/A
Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is the advancement of battery technologies. The race for the perfect battery is intensifying due to growing global demand for both the electric vehicle (EV) and stationary storage industries. The search is on for new ways to improve energy and power density, reduce charging time, and extend battery life. The project will create a diagnostic tool that provides an unprecedented glimpse inside the battery and has the potential to accelerate scientific understanding of how batteries age. A more accurate assessment of battery degradation in real time can inform on-board algorithms, can improve overall battery pack efficiency, and has major cost saving impacts for automakers and stationary storage users. This predictability enables more cost-effective warranty management, improved charging and safety algorithms, and ever more efficient battery pack designs. Having a sense of remaining useful life also enables the battery to be re-used in a secondary application - creating new business opportunities while a new revenue stream making batteries more sustainable. Ultimately, this reduces costs for both consumers and manufacturers, and contributes to greener use of resources for society. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project unlocks key insights for large-format lithium batteries. Today?s battery management systems (BMS) do not track a battery?s actual degradation metrics so it cannot forecast remaining useful life. This makes it hard to predict the ?cliff?, a sudden and steep drop in capacity near a battery?s end of life. This forces battery makers to overdesign battery systems to reduce chances of premature failure before the warranty expiration. The proposed research employs electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) onboard a BMS. EIS is a diagnostic tool that measures battery impedance - something only possible in a lab setting today. Tracking impedance unlocks a lifetime of degradation data and helps battery engineers better understand the long-term degradation behavior of high voltage battery packs. The project will focus on 1) minimizing the required hardware to measure impedance of each cell in a series-connected battery pack, and 2) reducing the down-time associated with the impedance measurement. The proposed innovation blends a unique hardware architecture with wide-bandgap semiconductors and adaptive charge-control algorithms to minimize hardware size. These help to reduce overall system cost and unlocks orders of magnitude improvement in hardware scalability over existing EIS methods. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

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