MARBEL

With the goal of accelerating the mass market take-up of these ultra-high-performance batteries for battery electric vehicles (BEV) and plug-in hybrids (PHEV), MARBEL project focuses on the need to optimize battery systems performance and the need to decrease the weight and required packaging space of battery packs in order to improve range. Additionally, higher performance of the battery packs, shorter charging times and longer distances travels raise further challenges on cooling needs. Addressing such needs will be achieved in MARBEL by designing and developing new modular and high-performance battery packs together with flexible and robust battery management systems for these BEV and PHEV, while maintaining safety levels, allowing fast, high quality and cost-effective large-scale production. A set of modules easy to pack together and to disassemble would ease the manufacture of different battery configurations sharing the same production process and common elements. MARBEL will design a compact and lightweight Battery Pack using guidelines and protocols in order to manufacture a battery pack easy to disassembly. In addition, MARBEL battery packaging design will be focused on Eco-Design by using sustainable and recycled materials. Furthermore, MARBEL will develop and qualify future and innovative performance- and safety- related test procedures of developed functionalities such as the use of miniaturized housings, a flexible test-bench simulating integration-in-EV conditions and artificial intelligence as a tool to reduce the time of laboratory experiments. In addition, higher modularity boosts secondary uses and enhances recyclability, resulting to global environmental improvement that will be assessed in MARBEL through detailed LCA studies in a circular economy context.