Grant to be used to develop and improve the safety and lifetime of Nissan electric car batteries
The School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science is pleased to announce that Dr. Kamyar Mehran, lecturer in Power Engineering at the School, has been awarded a feasibility study grant from Innovate UK totalling £450,000, as part of the government’s Faraday Battery Challenge. The project is a consortium involving Queen Mary, University of London, CDO2 Ltd., Inex Microtechnology Ltd., and the University of Sussex. The grant will be used to develop new technology which will assess and characterise the current flow through electric vehicle (EV) batteries. The project is borne out of a critical need to address two major problems in the electric vehicle industry: overheating and fires (known as thermal runaway) in batteries and the fear of not reaching a desired destination due to the battery running out (or range anxiety). With the help of this grant, Dr. Mehran hopes to develop a new generation of battery management systems. 'It’s been a while that I have been looking for a new type of sensory system for the online monitoring of the temperature of a battery pack and providing the most accurate estimation of the state-of-charge', said Dr. Mehran. 'From a casual conversation at an Innovate UK conference with Dr Gary Kendall, founder of the company CDO2 and the consortium leader, we came across this novel idea to use quantum sensors and multi-fusion sensory technique to solve the problem. I am really pleased that a funding in place now to make this happen. Our initial studies show a promising future for this technology'. Dr. Mehran, who is using Nissan pouch batteries for his study, hopes that his work will enhance the performance of battery packs in consumer vehicles and so improving public perception and trust in this essential new technology. It is anticipated that his work will have a major impact on the UK car industry with talk of one of the largest global car manufactures, Jaguar Land Rover, using the Nissan pouch batteries in its vehicles from 2020 when moving its fleet over to electric.