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Stellantis Tests New EV Battery That Eliminates Separate Charger and Inverter
Efficiency is crucial in every aspect of electric-vehicle design: engineers go to great lengths to gain even a 1 percent improvement in aerodynamics, motor efficiency, or climate control. So a 10 percent gain would be huge; it boosts an EV with 275 miles of range past the 300-mile mark.
That’s exactly what Stellantis, parent company of Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, and several other brands, says it has achieved in real world tests of a new battery, tested in an otherwise standard Peugeot e-3008. That’s a compact SUV not sold in North America, built on the multi-energy STLA Medium platform that is expected to underpin future Jeep, Chrysler, and perhaps Dodge vehicles.
Known as IBIS, for Intelligent Battery Integrated System, the new design uses software to control the voltage drawn from, and fed back into, each module individually. That design was first tested in a stationary battery connected to the power grid, and performed admirably over three years. But the peaks and troughs of power demand an EV battery must provide are far greater. Now, Stellantis says, the IBIS design has proven itself in mixed-use on-road testing.
Lower Weight, Higher Efficiency
Its increased efficiency comes from two sources: lower weight from eliminating separate hardware for the battery charger and inverter, and more efficient use of electrical energy during charging and driving. Overall, Stellantis said, the weight reduction averaged 40 kilograms (88 pounds). That means less energy is required to move the vehicle the same distance, even before factoring in more efficient use of battery energy by eliminating conversion losses from the separate inverter and charger.
Some definitions: The charger inside an EV converts alternating current (AC) from household charging equipment or a wall outlet into direct current (DC) to charge the battery. The inverter does the opposite: It converts DC from the battery to AC to power the traction motor, as well as outlets in the vehicle to power accessories such as refrigerators or boom boxes.
On Europe’s WLTC combined driving cycle, the Peugeot with the new battery design reduced energy consumption by 10 percent—and it cut energy used during AC charging by 10 percent as well, speeding up the charging in the process. A complete home recharge on a 7-kW charging station, for example, was cut to six hours from seven hours.
Eliminating the need to house bulky charger and inverter hardware and their associated high-voltage cables inside the vehicle also frees up space. If you’ve wondered why so many EVs lack the front trunks provided in Teslas and other ground-up EVs, one reason is that the underhood space formerly occupied by an engine and transmission are now taken up by those two components, along with climate-control hardware.
Heating and ventilating gear still has to be accommodated, but Stellantis says deleting two of those three assemblies frees up almost a cubic foot within the vehicle. That could be enough of a gain to trim a point or two off an EV’s critical coefficient of drag, though the Peugeot test car remained unchanged except for the substitute battery and the removal of the internal charger and inverter.
Software and Circuitry
Anne Laliron, Stellantis vice president of research, and Francis Ray, the manager for the IBIS project, said the secret to the new design was controlling power output from and input to each module individually.
The IBIS pack has relatively standard specifications for a compact electric SUV: 288 nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) cells are housed in 24 modules, with a total energy capacity of 65 kilowatt-hours. Maximum power output of the e-2008 is quoted at 170 kW (228 horsepower), though the team noted that battery output to the drive motor was 15 percent higher than it would have been if it used a standard inverter from an e-3008.
Where IBIS differs is the ability to address, monitor, and control the input to and output from each module separately, via software. That requires some additional circuitry, which Stellantis said is composed entirely of “proven, cost-optimized components,” meaning no exotic new circuit boards, connectors, or wiring. While those components incrementally increase the weight of the pack, it is greatly outweighed by the reductions from deleting separate inverters and chargers, along with more efficient energy use.
