Integrated sustainability assessment of tomorrow's battery concepts

Research Project, 2017

Electric vehicles of today mainly use Li-ion batteries. At the research frontline new materials and concepts are developed in order to meet the demands of tomorrow: longer range, increased durability, lower cost, etc. Some of these concepts show promising results on the materials or cell levels, but at the pack level they might not be that promising. For a sustainable future the picture can be even worse. The present project aims to combine different parameters to evaluate the total sustainability of different concepts. The sustainability will be judged from quite different point of views (economical, social, environmental) and will include performance requirements (energy and power demands). The origin for the study is material data, from which cells are constructed in silico. The cells will be the basis for a technical analysis of different battery packs for electric vehicles; a car and a bus. The different solutions will at the same time be analysed from a sustainability perspective