Battery management technology developer Ion Energy is working with Yatri Motorcycles in Nepal on an electric motorbike design (writes Nick Flaherty).

The bike, called Project Zero, is built from carbon fibre and uses a 30 kW motor running off a 6 kWh lithium-ion battery pack that provides a range of 230 km (150 miles) from a single charge.

The e-bike can charge up to 80% capacity in 2 hours using the FS-LT battery management system (BMS) supplied by Ion. The system manages between six and 25 cells in series and can detect up to 17 different errors and 18 events in the battery.

The BMS also monitors and logs more than 61 variables in real time. It has two onboard temperature sensors and five thermistor inputs for external sensing to manage the battery pack, and there are more than 130 configurable parameters to tune the behaviour of the pack to the design of the bike.

All the data is stored on an 8 Gbyte microSD card, but the BMS also uses a CAN bus 2.0 A&B interface for charger control and system interfacing, and a Bluetooth 4.1 BLE link to the onboard 7 in display. It has an Android app that displays the state of charge, current drawn, state of health, temperature, total voltage and the module voltage.

The system links to Ion’s Edison Analytics cloud software to provide additional battery management, using a digital model of the battery pack and BMS to optimise the variables.

Apart from a few components such as the suspension tyres and brake calipers, all the mechanical elements have been designed in-house.