Public-private synergies and technological partnerships: Flash Battery contributing its expertise in BMS and predictive analysis to the OPEVA European project for widespread adoption of electric cars and vehicle across Europe.

Building strategic collaborations and partnerships will be at the centre of Flash Battery’s upcoming participation in IVT Expo (Booth 2022) ,going live at Messe Köln from 28 to 29 June 2023. The trade show is an important meeting place between the world’s major players in new-generation components, materials, services and technologies, all driven by their willingness to continually innovate and take electric vehicle performance and sustainability to ever greater levels.

Creating synergies with excelling research centres, universities and leading actors in industry to foster development and dissemination of knowledge and technology is an overarching principle that guides Flash Battery not only on the commercial side with participation in trade shows and strategic events, but also on the growth side, by becoming engaged with enthusiasm in European and national research projects.

Public-private synergies supported by the European Union with funds and collaborative approaches to create productive and beneficial consortia, are becoming an invaluable way to drive the technological progress of the entire European ecosystem.

OPEVA – Optimization of Electric Vehicle autonomy, a collaborative European project that officially got under way on January 1, 2023, is the most recent step in a host of initiatives that Flash Battery has taken over the years to stay true to its commitment to contribute to and innovate the battery sector.

OPEVA – the European project for electric vehicle adoption in Europe

The OPEVA project will rely on a budget of €25.5 million to optimise the energy efficiency of electric vehicles through innovation in multiple technological domains in order to accelerate EV adoption in the market, consistent with the objectives of the Green Deal and the new European Battery Regulation.

Flash Battery will be working alongside 37 partners from 11 European countries over the course of three years. The roster of partners covers the entire value chain of electric mobility. Organisations the likes of Alkè, Sensichips and NXP Austria and major universities and research centres, such as the University of Perugia and Virtual Vehicle, just to name a few, will be working together on the shared goal of developing innovative solutions to make the electric vehicles of the near future more and more efficient and sustainable.

The collaborative European project, which falls under the Horizon Europe Framework Programme, is co-sponsored by the national authorities of participating countries via their specific ministries, and by Key Digital Technology Joint Undertaking. It also received funding from Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) and Innosuisse – Swiss Innovation Agency. Pertimm Developpement, a French company specialising in semantic search engines and artificial intelligence, will be coordinating the project.

Objectives of the OPEVA project

The main objective of the OPEVA project is to accelerate adoption of sustainable electric vehicles and improve their penetration in the European market by assigning a central role to the multiple actors involved in every aspect of the electric mobility value chain.

Partners will be contributing and exchanging expertise on the multiple areas identified by the project: six technology domains involving 23 key technologies, and four non-technical domains—economic factors, legal and ethical aspects, human factors, social and environmental factors—that need to be developed to ease the shift from conventional EVs to increasingly sustainable EVs.

A key aim of the OPEVA project is, in fact, to adopt an approach that promotes widespread use of electric vehicles by developing concrete performance-improving and sustainability-increasing solutions that also take into account the needs and requirements of final consumers, in an effort to make electric vehicles appealing to an increasing number of users.

Participants will be split up in work teams and collaborate to develop technological solutions encompassing the vehicle’s entire ecosystem: from improving communication between the vehicle and back-end data collection infrastructure through to development of dynamic routing algorithms and range improvements.

Technology domains of the OPEVA project

Partners will be focusing their research activities on six technological domains; these mainly involve the implementation of new tools and technologies responding to the following needs:

Aggregating vehicle information from battery, sensor and driver behaviour data in order to obtain a performance and consumption model customised to the individual vehicle and the individual user
Using external data collected by back-end systems to optimise individual driving episodes
Resolving the challenges presented by the communication between vehicle and data collection infrastructure
Implementing innovative charging methods
Improving knowledge about the state of the battery and cells during use, to achieve an improved BMS
Monitoring and analysing human factors to optimise electrical vehicle use

Non-technical domains considered by OPEVA

Project members will also be tackling four non-technical work domains to come up with concrete solutions to the factors currently identified as the main obstacles to the purchase of an electric vehicle. These include limited range, high price, legal and ethical aspects, limited charging facilities, and the time it takes to charge it.

Project results will be tested in 9 collaborative demonstrators, through which participants will be sharing their expertise and technology to ensure specific work objectives are viable. Universities and leading actors in the industrial world will be bringing their diverse expertise, enabling partners to focus on several crucial goals:

battery integration and power electronics combined with advanced sensors and AI techniques, to achieve a highly-energy-efficient power train
reduced energy consumption by enabling dynamic routing profiles combining internal and external vehicle data
development of techniques for accurate vehicle range prediction using predictive algorithms
introduction of efficient charging, sensing and diagnostics technologies, in order to cut down charging time and improve EV-grid integration.

Flash Battery’s know-how for a more efficient balancing system

Flash Battery’s role in the consortium will be especially important. We will be collaborating towards the smart integration of the battery with power electronics, in order to achieve a faster and more efficientcell balancing system.

More specifically, Flash Battery will be involved within the collaborative demonstrator 3 – Improved sensors for accurate battery monitoring whose focus is developing innovative battery and cell monitoring sensors to improve state of charge accuracy and prevent damage or faults.

Wireless sensors developed by an important research institute will also be integrated into an embedded platform of the data acquisition and processing system to obtain greater and more accurate information from the battery about the residual SOH in the cells and extract useful data for its second life.

The battery pack with greater predictive maintenance capabilities will be integrated into a demonstrator vehicle to test actual performance.

The collaborative participation in the OPEVA European project represents a challenging opportunity for Flash Battery to implement, with increasingly more accurate predictive functions, its patented proprietary Flash Balancing system, the BMS system representing the innovation engine at Flash Battery and already capable of ensuring battery performance stability over time through a comprehensive check of the battery, carrying out self-diagnostics and predictive maintenance and preventing faults.

Opeva, IPCEI, New Control, FASTEST, THOR, READY: creating opportunities for discussion and collaboration is definitely important for Flash Battery, especially projects that allow us to put our expertise in the service of the entire European ecosystem and, at the same time, help us grow by drawing upon high-quality knowledge, and crucial for the competitiveness of the EU in the area of electrification.