Welcome Message from Professor Wei Lu, ABCD Director
Welcome to the GM/UM Advanced Battery Coalition for Drivetrains (ABCD). ABCD is designed to create validated battery material, cell, and pack models, to speed their insertion into advanced electrified drivetrains, and to educate successive generations of industrial and academic workers to execute the resulting technology plans. ABCD is designed further to promote collaboration with university, government, and industrial partners in advanced technology workstreams that admit new technology challenges and workers and integrate them with ABCD’s overall aims.
The anticipated electrification of the drivetrain and its progenitors in hybrid systems have intensified work in batteries, an essential component in both fuel cell and gas/hybrid vehicles. We are now within reach of mass-marketed vehicles using Li-based batteries to reduce use of petroleum, addressing urgent environmental and geopolitical goals.
Full engineering analysis of batteries and battery systems must be regularized, and engineering development is needed to allow creation of products and tools for integration of battery systems into vehicles at this critical juncture. To fill the present gap between small- and large-scale production, a dedicated team of workers at General Motors and the University of Michigan have formed this coalition to create multiscale models of batteries, optimize their performance and design new methodologies for controlling their response. ABCD brings together not only GM and UM, but other universities globally, along with government laboratories.
Research at ABCD spans the gap between battery materials synthesis and vehicle integration. Efforts include multiscale modeling, optimization, characterization, and controls. Subprojects are underway at three universities and three GM sites around the world. Our approach is to engage partners at other institutions to solve research and technology problems as a team, rather than to build a columnar structure between two institutions alone. Working from the individual strengths and reach of the anchor institutions, GM and UM, we engage workers in several sectors with disparate expertise on vehicle electrification challenges.