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Case study: Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

A specially designed battery system – the largest ever for a passenger car – produced by Axeon is powering 102EX, the Rolls-Royce Phantom Experimental Electric.  

The Phantom Experimental Electric is a one-off working test bed, designed to assess the opinions and reactions to alternative drive-train options of a range of stakeholders, including customers.

The Axeon power pack is expected to deliver a range of up to 200km with a 0-60 mph acceleration time of under 8 seconds. The batteries can be recharged via a plug-in cable or by means of an advanced wireless induction charging system.

The Axeon pack for the car uses 96 lithium ion pouch cells which, thanks to some complex package engineering completed by Axeon’s technical team, fit into the space normally occupied by the car’s conventional engine and transmission. There is no difference to the 50/50 weight balance between front and rear helping maintain the car’s dynamic integrity.

The Axeon battery system is believed to be the largest passenger car battery built in the world, both in terms of capacity and power, with 71kWh overall capacity and 388V DC nominal power. The peak current that can be delivered is 850A, 330Kw.

The cells used in this battery are large-format NCM pouch cells. NCM (Lithium-Nickel-Cobalt-Manganese-Oxide) is a variant of lithium-ion chemistry that has particularly high energy and power densities. Being built into large format high capacity cells allows packaging of the battery in a limited space and also provides high power output.

The software, which is a customised version of the production version of Axeon’s proprietary Battery Management System (developed over the last five years and with over a million miles on the road), has been developed and tested on the test bench using specially designed hardware which was built to simulate the control functions of the final battery. This enabled the correct switching and sequencing functions of the software to be verified before the battery was built.

The battery should have a lifespan of over three years if it is used every day, though part of the purpose of this trial programme is to deliver a robust answer to the question of lifespan.