Proposals are expected to address Electric Vehicle (EV) batteries and are encouraged to develop techniques and methodologies which are applicable to other forms of electro-mobility as well as stationary applications (including second life).

Proposals are expected to address and demonstrate all the following activities:

• Understand and describe the impact of multi-physical operational loads, failure modes, ageing and misuse on battery reliability and safety highlighting the dependencies between them in order to design the most adequate testing methods and parameters;
• Derive advanced operating profiles for testing and development of novel X-in-the-Loop (XiL) test environments for multi-physical and accelerated testing addressing electrical, thermal and mechanical loads at the same time;
• Combine physics-based with data-driven test strategies enabling reliable virtual and physical battery testing considering specific applications;
• Develop simplified test strategies reducing the number of tests and their complexity while improving battery safety and reliability. Synergies between different battery chemistries, including next generation battery designs and sizes must be exploited where possible, allowing to re-use or scale test results from cell to system level;
• Research activities are also expected to lead to advanced response strategies for damaged and aged batteries. Furthermore, a contribution to the European safety classification system is expected by developing standards for this safety classification. To this end, proposals are expected to establish contact and exploit complementarities with selected proposals under topic HORIZON-CL5-2025-04-D5-03 “Safe post-crash management of road Light Duty Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) (2ZERO Partnership)” with regards to monitoring techniques for safety risks, algorithms for defining state of health and remaining useful life.

Activities covering the following aspects are encouraged:

• Development of virtual methods for full system validation using physical sub-system results;
• Development, exploitation, and harmonisation of advanced battery cell or pack measurement and diagnostic methods for enhancing the data depth and breadth over what is currently available. Definition of performance indicators relating to battery degradation and safety, and development of methods for the validation of digital models.
• Application of AI and generative AI for the definition of the design of experimental and testing strategies to increase the outcome of experimental testing campaigns, in order to accelerate achievement of significant conclusions, and to thus reduce testing time and effort.

Whenever the expected exploitation of project results entails developing, creating, manufacturing and marketing a product or process, or in creating and providing a service, the plan for the exploitation and dissemination of results must include a strategy for such exploitation. The exploitation plans are expected to include preliminary plans for scalability, commercialisation, and deployment (feasibility study, business plan) indicating the possible funding sources to be potentially used (in particular the Innovation Fund).