For a chance to get to know better the work of the project, we are introducing to you a series of interviews with the HEROES project partners, who will provide an insight into their experiences and tasks within the project.
This interview takes place with Enrico Baldasso, Systems Engineer at Sensata Technologies/Lithium Balance, and Sensata's side project manager for HEROES working for WP5.
Sensata Technologies/Lithium Balance was founded in 2006 as an ambitious start-up at the Danish Technological Institute, determined to push the battery-based electrification technology forward by developing, manufacturing, and selling Battery Management Systems (BMS) for lithium-ion battery technologies. With over 14 years of experience in a relatively young industry and over 700 customer projects, Lithium Balance is a dominant BMS solutions provider worldwide.
Lithium Balance is now part of Sensata Technologies (NYSE: ST), a leading industrial technology company that develops sensors and sensor-based solutions with over 22,000 employees and 12 business centers worldwide.
What is the role of your organisation in the HEROES project? What about your
role?
As part of the HEROES project, Sensata Technologies/Lithium Balance is leading the activities related to the development of the battery management system for the lithium-ion capacitor (LIC) cells. The LIC battery management system is based on Sensata’s latest BMS solution, the n3-BMS, and will include tailor-made algorithms as well as LIC specific calibration parameters to optimize safety, performance and lifetime of the LIC cells. The possibility to adapt the n3-BMS to the LiC technology is enabled by its unique software structure, which provides customers with the option to customize the battery management system with their own code and algorithms without impacting the ASIL C certification. Being the Sensata-side project manager, I oversee all our internal and external activities related to the development and testing of the LIC battery management system.
What do you like most about HEROES?
HEROES represents a great example of how multiple companies spread around Europe can effectively collaborate in projects aiming at disrupting the status-quo. Given the current electrification megatrend, it is exciting to see how the synergy between different companies, each one a leader in their specific sector, can be leveraged to create a new technology that has the potential to play a key role in the future of the transportation sector.
What is going to happen in the following months in your work?
In the next few months, we will be delivering a battery management system demo setup to the project’s system integrator, which will allow them to test and verify the communication between their energy management system and our battery management system. Secondly, we will be integrating into our BMS a LIC-specific state-of-charge estimation algorithm. This will be a fundamental step in the project, that will enable our BMS to accurately predict the remaining charge in the LIC cells, as well as to define the degradation state of the cells during live operation.
What positive impact did the project activities have in your organisation?
HEROES empowered our organization by creating awareness on the possibility to expand the market reach of our BMS systems beyond the lithium-ion technology. Following the completion of the project, the possibility to further distribute the LIC-tailored BMS will be evaluated by our business development teams. Additionally, the project is giving us the unique opportunity to verify the feasibility of including externally developed algorithms as part of our features portfolio. The validation of such possibility through the HEROES test-case will result in the future extension of such opportunity to a broader range of customers.
