Battery Optimization: Working Smarter, Not Harder

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

We’re often told that we use only a small part of our brains – easily demonstrated in your editor’s case.  What if we’re only using a small part of the battery power that’s available to us?  Fixing that would lead to smaller batteries working more efficiently, a significant step toward lighter power packages. Hybridcars.com shares this kind of thinking in two recent postings, the first about a $4 million contract beween  PARC, a Xerox company, its partner LG Chem Power and the U. S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy (ARPA-E) as part of the Advanced Management and Protection of Energy Storage Devices (AMPED) program.     According to hybridcars’ Philippe Crowe, the partners will,  “Develop a fiber optic monitoring system capable of providing detailed information about the internal condition of batteries. The end goal is to allow batteries to perform better in applications such as electric vehicles (EVs). This smart system will perform on-the-job training, learning the …