Fastest project: a concrete European commitment to fast-track battery testing systems

The battery industry is complex and constantly evolving. This makes cooperation between the multiple stakeholders in the supply chain all the more important in order to achieve the targets of the Green Deal and enable Europe to gain a strong leadership position in the future of mobility.

Competencies of all kinds are needed to accelerate technological progress across the entire European electrification sector and this has been precisely one of our main motivations for investing time and resources in European cooperation projects over the last several years.

Accelerating battery testing processes and obtaining more reliable, safer and more competitive batteries are, in fact, the ambitious goals of the European FASTEST Project, which officially got under way in June 2023. Flash Battery is a part of it together with other 13 partners from 8 European countries, who will be working in close collaboration for 36 months to make the European Union increasingly more competitive in the area of electrification.

Thanks to its extensive experience as a designer and manufacturer of lithium batteries for industrial machinery and vehicles, Flash Battery will bring the consortium a uniquely new angle detached from the automotive and stationary storage world and help to develop a “fast-track” battery testing platform supplying its own industrial use case.

The numbers of the FASTEST Project for a competitive EU battery value chain

14 partners, 36 months of work and a budget of nearly €5 million

The European FASTEST project, part of the Horizon Europe Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, was created to improve the industrial competitiveness of the EU battery industry by aiming to develop new, faster and more efficient testing solutions.

The limitations of current battery tests

Today, Europe’s battery R&D is grappling with very rigid standardised testing methodologies that leave little room for agility, take up a lot of time and resources, require expensive equipment, and are based on a general trial and error approach, while never really understanding the intricate multi-scale and multi-physics phenomena of the battery system as a whole. A battery system is a complex world and all kinds of chemical, electrical, mechanical, thermal and communication events are happening inside it.

Due to the complexity of the system and the added complications brought on by the current standard battery testing methodologies, the lithium battery development and commercialisation process in the EU has slowed down dramatically and often precludes manufacturers from bringing truly innovative solutions to market in a timely manner.

New advanced tests from FASTEST will accelerate market entry of European batteries

The FASTEST project—composed of a consortium of 14 European public- and private-sector partners, including companies, Universities and Research Centres—aims to streamline these processes by identifying and validating new and faster methods for assessing battery safety, performance and life so that increasingly reliable and efficient lithium batteries can be launched in the market faster.

Browse through the photo gallery of the FASTEST project kick-off meeting:

To this end, the European Union has allocated nearly 5 million euros for development and validation of a fast-track hybrid testing platform for battery system development that will be based on smart Design of Experiments methodology and enable accurate and reliable assessment of all the parameters in the cells and modules and in the battery packs as a whole.

To do this, results from physical experiments will be combined with multi-scale and multi-physics tests via a holistic and interconnected approach that will enable accelerated R&D of longer lasting, more reliable and safer batteries.

This fast-track hybrid platform will be a flexible instrument and will incorporate a complete set of physics-based and data-driven models geared towards reducing the costs and time frame to produce batteries by 20 to 30%. Once the platform has been developed, three representative use cases will be taken into account to demonstrate its efficacy:

• Automotive sector
• Energy storage
• Industrial and off-road vehicles

Thanks to this ground-breaking innovation, EU-based cell, battery and module manufacturers will have access to a key competitive advantage that will enable them to introduce their products in the international market faster and more efficiently, resulting in a more competitive European battery industry along the entire value chain.

Flash Battery’s industrial know-how in service of the fast-track hybrid testing platform for development of battery systems

Flash Battery will be specifically contributing in defining new testing standards by providing its own industrial use case and the protocol it uses to test the lithium battery packs it develops for industrial machinery and vehicles.

It will also provide the consortium with an extensive industrial application dataset, to be used for benchmarking activities and to establish the baseline.

This will enable development of a protocol of custom tests for industrial applications which, once the platform is completed, will be validated through a special virtual demonstrator. The Flash Battery technical team working in the FASTEST project will be contributing first-hand in improving the definition of testing activity scheduling algorithms and in subsequent validation through the demonstrator.  A custom-made battery pack will be put through multiple different tests and the results will then be compared with the data from the platform to verify it is working properly.

FASTEST project: a long-term European commitment

The collaboration with Universities, research centres and companies across Europe working in the electrification field represents a golden chance for Flash Battery to boost its own technical competencies, thanks to the sharing of different and complementary high value-added experiences and professional inputs. It is also a tangible way to share efforts and resources and be at the forefront of defining the technology guidelines that will serve to generate a long-term positive impact along the entire EU battery value chain.

Cooperation for progress is what drives us the most to take part in multiple battery-related European projects. Over the last several years, these projects have seen us engaged in defining technologies and strategies aimed at generating new competencies in the field. For us, the FASTEST project is an integral part of this shared goal and a commitment we proudly take on.