E-Mobility Engineering 014 l InoBat Auto dossier l In Conversation: Brandon Fisher l Battery monitoring focus l Supercapacitor applications insight l Green-G ecarry digest l Lithium-sulphur batteries insight l Cell-to-pack batteries focus

Wight concurs, adding that such differentiation will be a big challenge with EVs. “Everybody knows how to tune an IC engine: basically you put more air through it by whatever means you can,” he says. “It’s very different with battery EVs though, because they are not as flexible unless you start off with a higher spec battery and then derate it throughout the range, but that is very wasteful.” InoBat Auto has identified four market segments it considers underserved as routes to market for its cells, and offers customised chemistries in a range of form factors. Those segments are premium and performance automotive, aviation, commercial vehicles and off-highway machinery. While that might seem ambitiously broad at this stage, Wight argues that there are commonalities among these segments that enable them to be addressed initially by two types of chemistry. Automotive and aerospace “If you look at aerospace requirements, especially for VTOL aircraft, they need very high power on take-off and landing,” Wight says. “But landing is more critical for the battery because at that point you have a very low state of charge but still need maximum power. “That’s not so different from the needs of a performance car. If the battery is derated when its charge gets low so that full power is not available, the driver will be pretty disappointed.” Wight argues that high-performance automotive, motorsport and aviation have several other similarities in what they need and can tolerate from their cells. While high power and “reasonable” energy density are a must, he says, moderate service life compared with commercial vehicle batteries is tolerable, and the prices that the vehicles command allow them to live with relatively expensive cells. In contrast, commercial vehicles tend to have set duty cycles, and need good energy density for range coupled with long service lives, and they are more cost-sensitive, he says. They therefore need chemistries that are different from those that are best suited to the high- performance automotive and aviation sectors. “Between those two extremes you can cover quite a number of underserved segments of the market,” Wight says. MacAndrew adds, “For commercial vehicles, we anticipate applying a chemistry that offers extended service life, but that characteristic conflicts with chemistries optimised to deliver high power. So there are chemistries and form factors we believe will suit each of those.” The industry is coming out of a period in which vehicle designers took whatever cells they could get in volume, MacAndrew says, reporting that different segments are reconsidering their integration approaches and their expectations of cells. Dossier | InoBat Auto Research and development into cathode and anode chemistries over the short, medium and long terms are targeting energy- and power-focused cells, including solid-state types 22 Summer 2022 | E-Mobility Engineering