Consequently, prospective/prescriptive maintenance strategies, repairability and upgradability of vehicles must be addressed in relation to actual ageing and degradation of a component as part of upcoming CE strategies (including 9R approaches) to ensure longer (in terms of higher residual values) and more sustainable lifetimes of road BEV without over-sizing components and/or increasing the use of raw materials.

This topic focuses on the road BEV electric drive components relevant from a system integration point of view where high combined operational loads are to be expected, on the thermal management systems as well as on power electronics. The ageing and degradation of pack and module level is included whereas the battery cell level is excluded.

Proposals are expected to address all the following aspects:

• Analyse holistically the ageing and degradation of relevant, critical BEV functions and relevant sub-systems (excluding battery cells), that determine the Vehicle Lifetime and residual value under the aspect of functionality, safety and economic considerations (e.g., through correlating real-life operational loads with observed degradation and ageing effects);
• Develop tools and methods to assess, measure and predict ageing and degradation of relevant sub-systems (e.g. modelling combining multi-physical models describing ageing/degradations and vehicle operation and applying AI approaches, non-invasive evaluation to describe ageing and degradation over lifetime, multi-physical testing to accelerated occurrence of realistic ageing and degradation phenomena, use of novel sensors for measuring ageing and degradation in an electric drivetrain, etc.);
• Develop extended lifetime concepts and assess lifetime extension measures for BEV ensuring high residual values including right-sized design, operation, maintenance, refurbish and repair, by e.g. definition of prospective maintenance strategies, implementing ageing / degradation models into the design, advanced control strategies to minimise operational loads contributing to ageing and degradation phenomena including sensor technologies to obtain real-life operational data;
• For all relevant, critical components, follow the “digital product passport” approach, to achieve maximum traceability;
• Data management for operational loads, maintenance, and repair measures;
• Validation and demonstration of concepts and designs for higher residual values (less aging and degradation under operational conditions) appropriate to the TRL level via a full physical demonstrator of all components of the electric drive-in representative laboratory environment.

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership on ‘Towards zero emission road transport’ (2ZERO). As such, projects resulting from this topic will be expected to report on the results to the European Partnership ‘Towards zero emission road transport’ (2ZERO) in support of the monitoring of its KPIs.