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Batteries Europe’s Task Force on Safety has launched the first Safety Key Performance Indicator that gathers the most relevant definitions at material, cell and system level, regardless of the final application, with the aim to become “a reference for current and forthcoming EU R&I actions”.

The Task Force, composed by representatives of the industry and academia, took as baseline the previous analysis done by Batteries Europe in its Strategic and Innovation Agenda for lithium-ion batteries sector, but now the work has gone further by enlarging and broadening the scope to cover several technologies. The analysis has been done from the end-user perspective, identifying the most relevant three to four KPIs per level (material, cell and system) concerning the operation of the battery, including examples of methods to measure the indicators. For the different levels the following approach was considered:

• At material level, both the hazard of material itself and hazard caused by the interaction between materials in the cell were considered, leading to perform tests on small “concept cells”
• At cell level, the combustion of materials and consequences of the thermal runaway as well as the architecture of the cell are considered.
• At pack level, interaction between cells and possible propagation of the incident outside of the pack itself is evaluated.

The analysis would fill the gap identified by the European Commission when proposing the Horizon Europe research calls that were lacking of comparable KPI to contrast the safety level of different battery technologies. Safety -with cost, performance and sustainability- is one of the parameters for social acceptance of technologies; thus, industry, academia and policy makers are working on developing harmonized KPIs on the mentioned parameters to facilitate the benchmarking of the technologies.

The report, coordinated by Arnaud Bordes (INERIS) and Maitane Berecibar (VUB), has being reviewed by the Joint Research Centre and gathers the contributions of Anita Schmidt (BAM), Jonas Krug von Nidda (BAM), Carla Menale (ENEA), Mihails Kusnezoff (Fraunhofer IKTS), Piercarlo Mustarelli (UNIMIB), Maros Halama (TUKE), Claude Chanson (Recharge), Guillaume Cherouvier (Safran), Aurélie Boisard (Safran), Amaya Igartua (Tekniker) and Juan Gilabert (ITE).

Find the report here.