With over 200 e-bike battery fires in New York City in 2022, Soteria is organizing a coalition of companies to address the problem and identify best practices for e-bike battery safety.
GREENVILLE, S.C., April 26, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Soteria Battery Innovation Group (BIG) is organizing a coalition of companies across the industry to address the e-bike battery fire problem by identifying best practices and collective next steps to help the industry progress for a safer future. With several partners who have already agreed to help with this initiative, Soteria is extending the invitation to other companies and organizations to join, too.
Lithium-ion battery safety is a massive problem. Standard risk-analysis, implemented for lithium-ion batteries, predicts that the safety hazard of a battery scales as the size of the battery squared. This means that an e-bike, which has a battery that is 100 times the size of cell phone battery, imposes 10,000 times the risk, necessitating significant safety design features that are not necessary in a smaller battery. Recognizing that this hazard will not be reduced to an acceptable level with a single innovation or individual company, the E-bike Battery Safety Project will bring companies together in an open innovation atmosphere for the common good of the industry.
At Soteria’s Battery Pack Safety Center of Excellence, Soteria and its partners will run a project to identify and promote the best practices for e-bike battery packs. In 2022, there were over 200 e-bike battery fires in New York City—doubled from 2021. The project will include several facets:
- E-bike pack disassembly: Interns from the Clemson University Automotive Engineering Department will disassemble new e-bike batteries to identify best practices and beneficial design features.
- Used e-bike pack disassembly: Used packs will be disassembled to identify potential dangerous wear conditions and dangerous damage.
- Rider profiling: E-bike riders will be polled and interviewed to understand use patterns that may need to be accommodated in the battery pack design.
- E-bike OEM Interviews: E-bike OEMs will be interviewed to understand how safety is designed into the packs, what is necessary and what may be missing in the market and regulations.
Soteria invites you to participate and will be holding two informational webinars to outline the project more fully and discuss participation. Register to attend one of our informational webinars at https://soteriabig.com/events-webinars/.
An interested company may participate in this project in three different ways. At the Observer level, you will receive monthly reports as well as a copy of the final report, at a cost share of $2,500. The Participant level allows monthly meeting attendance and advisory board participation, giving real-time input to guide the experiments and contribution to the best practices report at a cost share of $5,000. And the Sponsor level allows all of the above, in addition to editorial input into the final report, at a cost share of $7,500.
“Soteria’s mission is battery safety, and this is one area where we feel we are in a unique position to bring together industry partners and help everyone cooperate to improve the safety of this important application of lithium-ion batteries,” said Brian Morin, CEO and co-founder of Soteria.
Please contact Dan Garrison at [email protected] to initiate discussions.
About Soteria Battery Innovation Group, Inc.
Soteria is a lithium-ion battery safety platform that includes both a technology to eliminate battery fires and consortium to promote best practices for lithium ion battery safety. Soteria’s patented technology eliminates the root cause of thermal runaway by forming a fuse around internal short circuits and allowing cells to continue to function. Soteria’s mission is to have inherently safe batteries everywhere, which Soteria believes will take a wholistic approach to safety, combining complementary safety technologies from many companies and strategies. Soteria’s consortium has over 125 members including NASA, Mercedes, Bosch, Motorola, Lenovo and many more. Soteria was founded in 2017 by Dr. Brian Morin and is headquartered in Greenville, SC. For more information, please visit www.soteriabig.com.
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SOURCE Soteria Battery Innovation Group
