Charging time is one of the regular criticisms aimed at EVs. People who have been used to refilling a fossil fuel car in a few minutes get very concerned about spending half an hour or more to top up a battery. Any improvement to this time can make a big difference to the EV experience and adoption rate. UK startup Breathe Battery Technologies reckons it has the solution – or part of it, at least.
“Breathe is a battery performance company,” says Dr Ian Campbell, CEO, Breathe Battery Technology. “We find ways to enhance standard battery system performance very significantly for our customers, especially in the automotive and consumer electronics industries. We give them software that significantly increases the capability of the batteries that they’re already buying from their battery suppliers.”
A lot of battery enhancements require a new cell or pack design but Breathe has taken a different approach, creating software that works with existing hardware. “A lot of the capability locked up in batteries isn’t being exploited,” says Campbell. “The idea was to extract this latent capability. The first products that we built are Breathe Charge and Breath Life. These are our flagship products today.”
Breathe is not just focused on the automotive industry. “Our products manage the charging process of a battery in a laptop or a smartphone, headphones or an electric car,” says Campbell. “Breathe Life manages the charging service delivery to focus on protecting the battery health to make it last longer. You get closer to the original battery performance for longer and the battery lifespan is improved. Today with Oppo we have 28 different models of handsets around the world shipping with our Life software. Instead of these handsets having a two-year lifetime, it’s four years, because the software is protecting it against a premature battery death.”
The software for the automotive industry uses Breathe’s technology to improve batteries in a different way, however. “Breathe Charge enhances charging speed, but it means more than that,” says Campbell. “It means more consistent charging across all the different scenarios, such as temperature environments and battery age.”
The technology has already attracted the attention of at least one leading automaker. In March, Volvo invested in Breathe and will be the first to use its technology in cars. “There’s a huge amount of financing taking place in scaling the production capacity of batteries,” says Campbell. “But hundreds of gigawatt hours of batteries are leaving factories with just a PDF beside them – a data sheet – that has some numbers statically written that say, look after me this way. Then the car manufacturers, everyone from Tesla, through to Ford, and GM, take those values from that data sheet and use them to look after their very expensive battery system.”
Breathe Charge brings takes a more dynamic approach. “We are replacing that kind of workflow,” says Campbell. “We enable a battery from one of these great cell manufacturers to arrive with a car manufacturer like Volvo, not only with a PDF beside it with some solid numbers, but with a piece of very intelligent software. That software function, by its very nature, is significantly more capable of looking after that battery. It dynamically evolves together with that battery as it evolves throughout its lifetime and with different usage scenarios.”
This includes the regular charge-discharge cycle. “It’s adjusting the charging as the state of charge goes up from zero to 100%, but also as the battery ages throughout its lifetime,” says Campbell. “It looks after this very dynamically, like how we might treat our bodies a bit differently as we get older.” Breathe’s use of software is both cheaper and faster to adapt to each new battery. “Batteries will increasingly be software defined,” argues Campbell. This fits into the overall automotive trend towards software-defined vehicles. “The battery is taking exactly the same route, and we are pioneering that shift.”
The dynamic software can squeeze out untapped potential. “Battery manufacturers are using artificially conservative values, so they are very far from their performance limitations,” says Campbell. “That leaves a lot of performance room and end user experience on the table. We developed a technology platform called Phi-X2, which is an electrochemical battery model. On the back of that technology, we look in real time as you’re using the car at what the true limitation of the system is, while still respecting all the safety boundaries that are so highly important.”
This capability is why Breathe won the sourcing agreement with Volvo to provide its Charge software for Volvo’s next generation electric car platform. “Manufacturers massively value software solutions to bring down costs,” says Campbell. “Customers like Volvo can adopt what we build very quickly, cost effectively, and without having to make any hardware change to their system. They don’t need to alter the cells. No chemistry, battery management system or thermal management system changes are required. They just need to program it into the BMS without any hardware changes, so it’s 100% compatible with existing microcontrollers.”
This helps solve a major problem all automakers encounter with their battery implementation. “You can optimize for charging speed, energy density, or costs,” says Campbell. “But the biggest difficulty is creating a balanced increase in all of them simultaneously. We get automakers out of that rock and a hard place. They don’t have to make that difficult trade off between charge speed and energy density. They can retain the same longevity, energy density and range, but they can suddenly have a significantly faster and more consistent charging experience by adopting Breathe Charge. The embedded software is essentially a drop-in replacement for the kind of lookup table that they have baked in that they receive from their cell manufacturers. It replaces this with a real-time physics-based battery model.”
The benefits can be substantial. “In Volvo’s case, under typical environmental conditions, we can help them and their customers to reduce the charging time by as much as 30%,” says Campbell. “As we move outside of that normal window, that number can often be even greater, for example in very hot or cold conditions. Also, when the battery ages, the traditional lookup table type approach can’t adapt to the battery quite as well. Volvo will be able to provide personal benefit to very many drivers.”
Breathe claims its software is far more capable of extracting performance than a pre-configured table of values. “By moving towards software defined battery systems, we can start developing batteries that are less subject to extremely painful trade off constraints,” says Campbell. “The automotive industry today is incredibly focused on charging consistency and performance.” Breathe reckons its technology can deliver both, as part of the move towards software defined vehicles.
“The extent to which software touches the battery system will become more and more deeply embedded in industry workflow,” concludes Campbell. “Today, we’re only scratching the surface of software’s influence on the battery system and the overall end user experience of the vehicle. The kind of performance that we’ll experience as end users will be meaningfully better off than where we are today and have been in the last decades.”
