Project owners : LiFETIME, Cambridge
The global market for electric vehicles (EVs) is growing exponentially. While this will reduce CO2 emissions and help address climate change, it is putting pressure on the global supply of critical minerals needed for EV batteries, such as lithium, and is already generating a large amount of toxic waste in landfills. Less than 5% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries are recycled, and even less are reused or repurposed. This is extraordinarily wasteful: batteries are unsuitable for EVs once they have fallen below 80% capacity, but still meet the standards for less demanding applications like energy storage while they have between 30% and 80% capacity. In order to assemble effective second-life batteries safely and effectively, it is necessary to be able to measure the state-of-health (SoH) of each cell.
To address this problem, LiFETIME is developing a low-cost, open-source solution for cell health testing for second life battery applications. Originally formed by a team of Cambridge Masters students in 2022, LiFETIME aims to facilitate battery reuse and re-purposing by developing accessible and reliable technology for SoH measurement. The unique value proposition of LiFETIME’s solution is providing a low-cost, accessible technology to group battery cells with similar capacities together. Grouping cells with similar SoHs is the key to building efficient second life packs, as one weak cell will compromise the entire battery’s performance. Based on LiFETIME’s framework for SoH determination, cells are grouped into different bands within 5% charge capacity of each other.