The Hyundai Motor Group and three battery companies will cooperate to enhance safety technology.
On the 22nd, Hyundai Motor, Kia, LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, and SK On announced the results of a year-long collaboration to develop safety enhancement technology for electric vehicle batteries at the Hyundai Motor and Kia Namyang Research Center in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province. They also signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to further enhance future cooperation.
Earlier, in August of last year, the Hyundai Motor Group proposed forming a 'Battery Safety Assurance Task Force' comprising personnel from research and development, production processes, quality, and patents, and the three battery companies responded by collaborating for a year.
As part of their collaboration, the Hyundai Motor Group and the three battery companies selected five key collaboration tasks to enhance battery quality and safety: ▲ Safety patents ▲ Digital battery passports ▲ Design quality ▲ Manufacturing quality ▲ Firefighting technology.
Regarding safety patents, the goal is to share the safety patent technologies developed by each party, such as fire prevention. Over the past year, they have derived shared patents like short circuit prevention technology and plan to continue sharing new patent lists.
The digital battery passport is a system aimed at digitizing all lifecycle information related to battery production, disposal, and recycling. The Hyundai Motor Group and the three battery companies are currently establishing a new battery quality tracking system that meets international standards and includes safety-specific items.
The design quality task aims to apply robust design to battery cells to pre-verify the causes of battery fires and ultimately enhance battery safety. The companies plan to derive improvements starting from the design methods of the factors constituting the battery cells and incorporate advanced standard verification criteria and management measures into the cell design process.
Regarding manufacturing quality, Hyundai Motor, Kia, and the three battery companies are collaborating to inspect the cell manufacturing process to stabilize production and reduce defect rates. In the future, they plan to establish an intelligent manufacturing management system that leverages artificial intelligence to enhance analysis quality.
Concerning the firefighting technology task, Hyundai Motor, Kia, and the three battery companies have applied for patents for jointly researched battery cell fire detection systems and fire suppression technologies and have revised the electric vehicle fire response guide in collaboration with the National Fire Research Institute.