This software can speed up charging of your electric car battery by 30%

Charging time is one of the common criticisms of electric vehicles. People who are used to filling up their fossil fuel-powered cars in minutes are very concerned about spending half an hour or more to top up the battery. Any improvement in this time could make a big difference to the EV experience and adoption rate. British startup Breathe Battery Technologies thinks it has a solution – or at least part of it.

“Breathe is a battery performance company,” says Dr. Ian Campbell, CEO of Breathe Battery Technology. “We find ways to significantly improve the performance of standard battery systems for our customers, particularly in the automotive and consumer electronics industries. We provide them with software that significantly improves the performance of the batteries they already buy from their battery suppliers.”

Many battery improvements require a new cell or pack design, but Breathe took a different approach, creating software that works with existing hardware. “A lot of the capabilities that are locked away in batteries are not being used,” Campbell says. “The idea was to unlock that hidden capability. The first products we built were Breathe Charge and Breath Life. Those are our flagship products today.”

Breathe isn’t just focused on the automotive industry. “Our products manage the charging process for a laptop or smartphone, headphones or electric car,” Campbell says. “Breathe Life manages the delivery of charging services to focus on protecting the health of the battery so it lasts longer. You get closer to the original performance of the battery for longer, and the battery life is improved. Right now, with Oppo, we have 28 different phone models shipping globally with our Life software. Instead of two years of life on those phones, it’s four years because the software protects them from premature battery drain.”

Automotive software is using Breathe technology to improve batteries in a different way. “Breathe Charge increases the speed of charging, but it means more than that,” Campbell says. “It means more consistent charging across all different scenarios, like temperature environments and battery age.”

The technology has already caught the attention of at least one major automaker. In March, Volvo invested in Breathe and will be the first to use the technology in cars. “There’s a huge amount of funding going on in scaling battery capacity,” Campbell says. “But hundreds of gigawatt-hours of battery come out of the factory with nothing but a PDF file—a data sheet—that has numbers written on it statically that say, take care of me this way. Then automakers from Tesla to Ford to GM take those numbers from that data sheet and use them to take care of their very expensive battery systems.”

Breathe Charge introduces a more dynamic approach. “We’re replacing that type of workflow,” Campbell says. “We’re enabling a battery from one of these great cell manufacturers to go to a car manufacturer like Volvo not just with a PDF file with some hard numbers, but with some very intelligent software. That software capability, by its nature, is much more capable of looking after that battery. It dynamically evolves with the battery as it evolves over its lifespan and in different usage scenarios.”

This includes a regular charge-discharge cycle. “It adjusts the charge as the state of charge goes from zero to 100 percent, but also as the battery ages over its lifespan,” Campbell says. “It handles this very dynamically, in the same way that we might treat our bodies a little differently as we age.” Breathe’s software is cheaper and quicker to adjust to each new battery. “Batteries are going to become more and more software-defined,” Campbell argues. This is part of a general automotive trend toward software-defined vehicles. “The battery is going to go down the same path, and we’re pioneering that change.”

Dynamic software can squeeze out untapped potential. “Battery manufacturers are artificially conservative, so they’re very far from their performance limits,” Campbell says. “That leaves a lot of room for performance and end-user experience. We’ve developed a technology platform called Phi-X2, which is a model of an electrochemical battery. With that technology, we look at the real limits of the system in real time, as you’re using the car, while still respecting all the safety limits that are so important.”

That capability is why Breathe won a contract with Volvo to supply Charge software for Volvo’s next-generation electric vehicle platform. “Manufacturers really value software solutions to help reduce costs,” Campbell says. “Customers like Volvo can adopt what we’re building very quickly, very cost-effectively, and without having to make any hardware changes to their system. They don’t have to change the cells. There’s no change to the chemistry, the battery management system, the thermal management system. They just have to program it into the BMS without any hardware changes, so it’s 100 percent compatible with their existing microcontrollers.”

This helps solve a major problem that all automakers face when implementing batteries. “You can optimize for charging speed, energy density, or cost,” Campbell says. “But the biggest challenge is creating a balanced increase in all of those factors at the same time. We’re getting automakers out of that difficult situation. They don’t have to make that difficult trade-off between charging speed and energy density. They can keep the same durability, energy density, and range, but they can suddenly get much faster and more consistent charging by adopting Breathe Charge. The built-in software is essentially a drop-in replacement for the kind of lookup table that they’ve built in and that they get from the cell manufacturers. It replaces that with a real-time physics-based battery model.”

The benefits can be significant. “For Volvo, in typical environmental conditions, we can help them and their customers reduce charging times by up to 30 percent,” says Campbell. “When we go outside that normal window, that number can often be even greater, for example in very hot or cold conditions. In addition, as the battery ages, the traditional look-up table approach can’t adapt as well. Volvo will be able to deliver personal benefits to a great many drivers.”

Breathe says its software is much more capable of extracting performance than a pre-configured table of values. “As we move toward software-defined battery systems, we can start developing batteries that are less susceptible to these incredibly painful trade-offs,” Campbell says. “Right now, the automotive industry is incredibly focused on charge consistency and performance.” Breathe believes its technology can deliver both, as part of the transition to software-defined vehicles.

“The extent to which software impacts the battery system will become more and more embedded in the workflow of the industry,” Campbell concludes. “Today, we are just scratching the surface of how software will impact the battery system and the overall end-user experience of the vehicle. The type of performance we will experience as end users will be significantly better than what we are experiencing today and have experienced in decades.”