Graz University of Technology has received approval for the new COMET K1 Center “Battery4Life”. Led by Christian Ellersdorfer from the Institute of Vehicle Safety, the center aims to make batteries safer, more durable and more sustainable. The project is being funded with almost 19 million euros. Of this amount, 6.5 million euros will be provided by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency. Additional funding will be provided by the federal states of Styria and Upper Austria, as well as by industrial partners from the automotive and electronics industries. The project is scheduled to run for a period of four years.
Focus on Safety and Sustainability
The center will build on the results of the previous COMET project SafeLIB and use the Battery Safety Center Graz as a test environment. One focus is on improving battery technology using experimental and virtual methods, complemented by artificial intelligence approaches. The goal is to make more accurate predictions with fewer experiments and less computation. Another research focus is the evaluation of the safety status of used batteries to enable their reuse as stationary energy storage.
