Assessment of battery technologies for electric vehicles

The duty cycle to which the battery in an all-electric racing vehicle is subjected is considerably more demanding than that of an urban electric vehicle. Indeed, the combination of high acceleration rates and full regenerative braking (which leads to high charge/discharge rates of the order of 20C) results in the need to operate well outside the limits recommended by the manufacturer. The author describes how, in order to accurately determine both the performance and the duration of a given power source an experimental facility has been constructed which enables a battery to be subjected to the same duty cycle as would be demanded by the race vehicle driven round a particular race circuit