Press Release Archives - DEFACTO: Battery Design And Manufacturing Optimization

Mr. Boschidar Ganev

Mr. Boschidar Ganev is a project manager at AIT Austrian Institute of Technology for Low-Emission Transport, coordinating national and EU-funded projects in the domain of vehicle electrification and electric mobility, with a focus in recent years on traction batteries for EVs. He is currently the coordinator for the project 3beLiEVe. Prior to joining the world of research, he served as Operations Analyst and Environmental Sustainability Manager in the financial services sector. Mr. Boschidar holds a Masters in International Business Management and an MSc in Renewable Energy.

Dr. Oscar Miguel Crespo

Dr. Oscar Miguel Crespo holds a PhD in Chemistry by the University of the Basque Country (Spain). He joined CIDETEC back in 1999, and currently works as Director of the CIDETEC Energy Storage Institute. He has been involved in energy related industrial research activities for more than 15 years including technology generation, transference and product development. Today he and his team are fully devoted to advanced battery technologies, including Li ion and Post-Li ion technologies. The team that he represents currently covers all the value chain from materials to battery packs, including battery cell manufacturing at pilot scale. All this activity covers from knowledge generation to product development and transference in close cooperation with industry partners all through Europe.

He is heavily involved in the European batteries community, representing CIDETEC Energy Storage in industrial and research initiatives like ETIP Batteries Europe, BEPA – The Batteries European Partnership Association, EBA – The European Battery Alliance, and several other industrial research associations.

Dr. Eng. Lluís Trilla

Dr. Eng. Lluís Trilla (BSc on Industrial Engineering, UPC 2006 and MSc in Control and Automatics, UPC 2009) has experience in developing projects for the low and medium voltage grid and has also collaborated with the research group CITCEA-UPC where research projects were developed for companies improving control strategies for electric actuators including implementation and test stage. In 2013 he obtained his PhD in IREC (Catalonia Institute for Energy Research) on the topic of advanced controllers applied to power converters for wind energy conversion systems. Currently is developing industrial and public projects focusing on the application of power electronics and the design of control systems for renewable energy systems. Currently, he is a PostDoc researcher at IREC where he works on different fields such as grid integration of renewable power, grid codes analysis, and battery management systems for new battery types and EVs.

Prof. Dr. David Howey

Prof. Dr. David Howey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. He leads a group focused on modelling and control of energy storage systems, with a particular focus on Li-ion batteries for electric vehicles and grid/off-grid storage. He received the MEng degree in Electrical and Information Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 2002 and his PhD from Imperial College London in 2010. Since 2010 he has co-authored 80+ peer-reviewed journal and conference articles, and 5 filed patents. He was an editorial board member of IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy (2014-2020), and is currently on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, and is co-founder of the internationally respected Oxford Battery Modelling Symposium. He is the recipient of recent funding from EPSRC, InnovateUK, UKRI, Faraday Institution, Continental AG, and Siemens, and he co-leads control and estimation tasks in the Faraday Institution Multiscale Modelling project. Howey is also the lead academic on the industry-led £40m Energy Superhub Oxford that will build a transmission connected 50 MWh hybrid battery. He previously led the Faraday Institution “UK EV and Battery Production Potential” project (with McKinsey), and was academic lead in InnovateUK projects on battery re-use (EP/P510737/1) and solar home systems in Africa (EP/R035822/1), and a $1.2m Korean project on microgrids, plus Co-I in EPSRC projects TRENDS, FUTURE vehicles, STABLE-NET and RHYTHM. Professor Howey is co-founder of Brill Power Ltd., a company spun-out of his lab in 2016 focused on advanced battery management system topologies. They have raised significant early-stage funding and licensed several patents from his group. Howey also won a Samsung GRO Award on modelling leading to two R&D contracts and a multi-year collaboration, with results patented by Samsung Electronics.

Prof. Dr. Arnulf Latz

Prof. Dr. Arnulf Latz is professor for Electrochemical Multiphysics Modeling at the University of Ulm, head of department for Computational Electrochemistry at the Institute for Engineering Thermodynamics (German Aerospace Center in Stuttgart) with nearly 40 PhD and postdoctoral researcher. He is the principal investigator for Electrochemical Multiphysics Modeling at the Helmholtz Institute Ulm for Electrochemical Energy storage and member of the board of directors of the Helmholtz Institute Ulm. Arnulf Latz is also principal investigator in the cluster of excellence POLIS for the investigation of post lithium storage devices at the University of Ulm und the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He studied Physics at the Ludwigs-Maximilians University Munich and received his Ph.D. degree in Theoretical Physics from the Technical University Munich in 1991. After 10 years in academic research in USA and Germany, he entered the field of applied research and was from 2002-2012 head of the group “Complex Fluids” at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics (ITWM) in Kaiserslautern, before joining German Aerospace center and University of Ulm in 2012 as full professor for Electrochemical Multiphysics Modelling. His main research interests are modeling and simulation of electrochemical storage and conversion technologies from the nanometer to the cell scale with a focus on rigorous, theory based non-equilibrium thermodynamics approaches and microstructure resolved simulations. The software BEST (Battery and electrochemistry simulation tools), which has been developed in his group at the Fraunhofer ITWM and is now being further developed in a cooperation between the German Aerospace center and the Fraunhofer ITWM was the first software being able to perform coupled transport and electrochemical reaction simulation in 3 D resolved tomography based microstructures.

Prof. Alejandro A.Franco

Prof. Alejandro A.Franco (born 1977 in Argentina) is Full Professor at Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France and Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He is the leader of the Theory Open Platform at the ALISTORE European Research Institute. He is grantee of an ERC (European Research Council) consolidator grant for his project “ARTISTIC” dealing with the development of a digital twin of the lithium ion battery manufacturing process. ARTISTIC aims at demonstrating a series of physical and machine learning models allowing to predict the impact of manufacturing parameters on electrode and cell properties and to perform automatized inverse design. The project also aims to offer an open data repository and online services for battery manufacturing multiscale simulations. Prof. Franco’s main research interests include multiscale modeling and artificial intelligence applied to energy storage and conversion devices. He published more than 90 peer-reviewed articles, 10 invited book chapters, 3 invited edited books, 20 patents, and delivered more than 70 invited keynotes/invited oral presentations in international conferences. He has been coordinator/PI/Work package leader in several national and European projects as well as in bilateral projects in collaboration with industry. He is recipient of one of the French National Prizes for Pedagogy Innovation (PEPS 2019) for his use of Virtual Reality for battery education at the University Level. Prof. Franco is also involved in Science Dissemination activities towards general public, with frequent invited presentations in Science Festivals like Pint of Science, participation in radio programs, etc.

Dr. Deidre Wolff

Dr. Deidre Wolff is working as part of the Sustainable Production and Life Cycle Engineering team at TU Braunschweig (TUBS) Institute for Machine Tools and Production Technology as a Research Associate. Within this team, she is involved in the coordination of the EU H2020 project, LiPLANET, which is being led by TUBS. Deidre also works for the Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films as part of the Sustainable Factory Systems and Life Cycle Management team. Before this, she worked as part of the Energy Systems Analytics team at Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC) as a Project Engineer. She has extensive experience in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and has conducted LCA studies of various innovative technologies in the energy sector. Her interest as a researcher is in uncertainty management in LCA, which was the focus of her PhD thesis at Technological University Dublin. During her PhD research, she completed a Traineeship at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. Here she worked as part of the toxicology team to assess the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) characterization factors for human and aquatic toxicity. She further has a Master of Science in Sustainable Energy and Green Technologies from University College Dublin and a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Simon Fraser University in Canada.

Ms. Idoia Urdampilleta

Ms. Idoia Urdampilleta is leading the Materials for the Energy Unit at CIDETEC Energy Storage, coordinating the activities related to battery development in different technologies as advanced Li ion batteries, Solid electrolyte batteries, Li Sulfur batteries and others. Modelling and post mortem activities are developed within the group. She is coordinating the battery manufacturing plant. She has been participating in several national and European projects as well as in bilateral projects in collaboration with industry.

Dr. Martin Petit

Dr. Martin Petit graduated from Ecole des Mines of Nancy in 2007 and obtained his PhD in chemical engineering of INPL in 2011. He joined IFPEN battery modelling team as an electrochemical engineer in 2012 and has contributed to the development of electrical storage systems models for system simulation in automotive applications. He takes part in the development of modelling approaches from empirical to electrochemical models, accounting for the nominal behaviour of cells in experimental and realistic environments as well as their aging behaviour; Since 2012 he is involved also in the development of Li-ion batteries safety models at cell and pack levels. Since 2020, Martin is the coordinator of MODALIS² H2020 project dedicated to the development of a modelling toolchain for Gen3b and Gen4 batteries behaviour.

Dr. Ruben Kühnel

Dr. Ruben Kühnel is a staff scientist at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology. His research interests focus on liquid electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries and related battery technologies. He is the project leader of the H2020 project SeNSE that aims to develop next-generation lithium-ion batteries based on Si/C anodes and Ni-rich NMC cathodes. Dr. Kühnel holds dual degrees in chemistry and business chemistry and carried out his doctoral studies at the MEET Battery Research Centre of the University of Muenster, Germany.

Dr. Simon Clark

Dr. Simon Clark is a research scientist and engineer developing new theory and model-based design tools for electrochemical devices. After earning his B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech in the USA, he worked as a design simulation consultant for the German spaceflight industry. He earned his doctorate in Computational Electrochemistry at Ulm University through cooperation with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Helmholtz Institute Ulm (HIU). Since 2018, he has worked as a research scientist at SINTEF Industry in Trondheim, Norway.

In his scientific work, Dr. Clark focuses on bridging the gaps between experimental and modelling research, as well as improving the theoretical basis for electrochemical models.

Currently, Dr. Clark coordinates the EU project Hydra pursuing generation 3b Li-ion batteries, leads the development of the Battery Interface Ontology (BattINFO) to support interoperability of electrochemical data, and consults to the Li-ion cell manufacturing industry.

Prof. Arno Kwade

Arno Kwade finished his PhD as a process engineer studying ultrafine wet grinding in stirred media mills in 1996, after which he worked in industry heading a consultancy and as general manager in the mass production of concrete parts for about nine years. Since 2005 he has been professor and head of the Institute of Particle Technology at Technische Universität Braunschweig. In parallel he was Dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering from 2011 to 2013 and Senator of TU Braunschweig from 2013 to 2015. His expertise lies in the processing and tailoring of particulate materials using mechanical stresses (especially in dispersing, fine milling, and compaction processes), the simulation of these processes, and formulation of advanced materials and products, today especially battery electrodes and drugs. Since 2011 he has led the Battery LabFactory Braunschweig (BLB), in which the entire process chain to produce lithium‐ion battery cells is intensively investigated. Moreover, since 2016 he has been speaker of the German competency cluster on battery cell production funded by the BMBF, and since 2018 vice‐spokesman of the board of battery research Germany and board member of the new Fraunhofer project center for energy storage and systems, ZESS.

Prof. Kristina Edström

Prof. Kristina Edström is the Coordinator of Battery 2030+ and Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Uppsala University.

Mr. Luca Feola

Mr. Luca Feola has his background studies as a Mechanical Engineer. He spent the first part of this career, from 2012 to 2019, in the private sector in the automotive domain working for Toyota Motor Europe in Brussels.

While at Toyota Motor Europe, he was responsible for development and quality of electric and hybrid powertrains components such as the battery, the inverter and the transmission systems sold in Europe. He returned to Italy for one-year period to work for Toyota Italy in order to gain customer-facing experience. During the last part of his career in Toyota Motor Europe, he managed the quality and the development of a commercial vehicle realised in partnership with Peugeot-Citroen.

He moved to public sector in the former European Commission Executive Agency INEA (now CINEA – European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency) in 2019, where he joined the Horizon 2020 – Transport research team. He currently manages a portfolio of 17 projects, split between Battery development projects and Green Vehicles projects.

Ms. Elixabete Ayerbe

Ms. Elixabete Ayerbe is leading the Modelling and Post-mortem Group of the Materials for Energy Unit of CIDETEC Energy Storage, coordinating the activities related to multiphysics and data-driven models, as well as the parameterization and post-mortem analysis for Li-ion and advanced Li-ion batteries. She is currently coordinating H2020 DEFACTO project and coordinated in the past the FP7 SHEL project. In addition, she represents the multiphysics modelling activity of CIDETEC in several H2020 EU projects, such as SPICY, HIFI ELEMENTS, SPIDER, CoFBAT, BIG-MAP and Battery2030PLUS, and leads the area of Manufacturability in Battery 2030+ initiative.

Press Release

DEFACTO to hold joint online workshop on digital approach in battery development