GrEEnBat: Getting Europe's electric vehicles on the road

​Charging, range and cost are just some of the concerns regarding electric vehicle batteries. Thankfully, industry is making strides in quashing these concerns. The GrEEnBat Spearhead Project aims to improve battery technology for electric vehicles by scaling up the fabrication of silicon/graphene composite electrodes for anodes in lithium–ion batteries, and to develop a fully functional battery module for automotive applications.

The output of the strategic three-year project will be an automotive battery module prototype that is composed of 60 to 90 battery electric vehicle (BEV) cells. Here, the core of innovation, which will result in a significant technological advantage over existing technology, will be the negative electrode of the cell, composed of a silicon-graphene composite developed during earlier Graphene Flagship research projects.

Graphene Flagship industrial partners Varta Micro Innovation, BeDimensional, BMW and Varta Microbattery are basing the battery technology on patented graphene fabrication and silicon-graphene compounding processes. All of the targeted specifications for materials, cells and modules will be able to compete with the predicted state-of-the-art modules in 2025.

"We are building on extensive work on this topic during the first years of the Graphene Flagship Project and the previous-spearhead project on Batteries," explained Stephen Koller, CEO of Varta Micro Innovation and GrEEnBat leader at the Graphene Flagship. "The prospective activities are based on this work and the relating results. For the next three years, the same concept will be used and further optimised to achieve the targeted lifetime of 1000 cycles.

"The final module prototype shall offer a lifetime of 1000 cycles, whereby end of life is 80 per cent capacity retention, which refers to a total driving range of ~450.000 km. This is prospected to be competitive to SotA lithium-ion based modules in 2025. In addition, there are requirements in safety and costs."