Performance evaluation of battery-based energy storages for various duties, in terms of power, energy and environmental impact

Research Project, 2022 – 2026

In this project, various storages with a basis in Li-ion technologies are investigated in terms of their power and energy ability, linked to their environmental impact. The environmental impact is determined during the user phase as well as during the extraction phase. At the centre of the investigation are the Li-ion battery technologies, with various cathode materials containing both Cobalt and Nickel as well as Lithium iron phosphate which is a technology without these heavy rare-earth metals. The power and energy capacity varies with these cathode materials, and also by changing the anode material to Lithium titanate oxide a very high power ability can be obtained. Furthermore, by designing the electrodes with different thicknesses the power versus energy capacity can be altered. Additional storage elements such as supercapacitors and fuel cells, and to a small extent Hydropower are lightly covered in order to bring completeness around the energy storage. The requirements for the energy storage systems are also established, here other already ongoing activities at the division of Electric Power Engineering will be utilised. Apart from purely dedicated energy storage for the power system, also vehicle batteries exposed to Vehicle to Grid (V2G) will be investigated. First in terms of a dedicated vehicle battery design and then utilising a design originally intended for pure vehicle applications without V2G abilities. The project is a PhD project reinforced with a postdoc/specialist and involves 5 industrial partners. From the university side, various competencies are represented, including power engineering, physics/chemical engineering as well as environmental engineering.