CIDETEC Energy Storage provides an Open Source tool for understanding the internal operation of batteries

CideMOD is available in GitHub, being the first tool of its kind to solve the behaviour of cells in three dimensions

Understanding energy storage systems to address the challenges of the energy transition to electrification is paramount to shortening deadlines. With this objective in mind, CIDETEC Energy Storage has developed cideMOD, an Open Source modelling tool that helps battery designers, manufacturers and developers understand the internal workings of batteries and advance their research.

In this way, CIDETEC shares its know-how in modelling, acquired thanks to 25 years of experience working with batteries and forged in dozens of European projects, with one of the few tools of its kind in the world and the only one in Spain.

cideMOD (available on the GitHub portal ) enables cell-design behaviour to be understood through simulation-based analysis, being the first tool of its kind to consider the full domain and its actual geometry in three dimensions. By combining electrochemical response (including mechanical response), temperature response, and the SEI (Solid Electrolyte Interphase) in the three dimensions of the cell using a single simulation tool, this provides knowledge about the non-homogeneous behaviour of the cells under varied usage patterns. All this makes enables relevant issues to be resolved such as the performance of the battery in relation to its components, to see the effect of the thermal behaviour, to understand the degradation of the battery and to detect the possibilities for improving it.

CIDETEC Energy Storage continues to work on the interoperability of modelling tools within the framework of the European BIG-MAP project, where open infrastructures are being generated to make them available to the scientific community to accelerate development, with the aim of standardising these tools to speed up developments and including new functionalities such as mechanical degradation, within the European DEFACTO project.

On the other hand, the Battery Modelling Unit of CIDETEC Energy Storage has gone further with the development of Proteo, a more advanced modelling tool that, with the same basis of cideMOD, allows many more battery characteristics to be modified such as electrode and electrolyte configuration, and cell geometry via an intuitive and easy-to-use web application.