Flash Balancing System: Flash Battery’s BMS gets the Italian patent
20 April 2023
The most influential Big Tech companies teach that to win in the field of technology you have to think differently and put out ground-breaking innovations that anticipate what the market will want or need.
This is the attitude with which Marco Righi and Alan Pastorelli founded Flash Battery in 2012, starting out from a garage just like the Cupertino giant (Apple), and foreseeing huge potential for lithium batteries equipped with an intelligent control system in the field of industrial machinery and vehicles.
In 2022 that intuition paid off after years of studies, tests and research, with Flash Battery obtaining the Italian industrial invention patent for its proprietary BMS Flash Balancing System.
After the application filed in 2019, Flash Battery’s Battery Management System officially receives the Italian Certificate of Patent as an industrial innovation
It has been more than two years in the waiting after the filing of the application at the end of 2019, but finally, Italy’s Ministry of Economic Development officially granted Flash Battery the industrial invention patent for the architecture of the proprietary Flash Balancing System , the combined active-passive high-power balancing system implemented on all Flash Battery lithium batteries that keeps the cells equalised and efficient for the entire life of the battery (over 4,000 cycles), ensuring high efficiency and performance excellence over time.
The main purpose behind the patent application was to get down on paper the entrepreneurial idea that a little less than 10 years ago led the two founding partners of Flash Battery to create a one-of-a-kind battery management system for lithium batteries, adding value to the entire industrial segment and making a vital contribution to the company’s success in an electrification market that was still in its nascent stages at the time.
“For a young and fast-growing company like ours that began as a startup and operates in an electrification sector that is buzzing with activity, having this patent under our belt enables us to protect our intellectual property, elevates our industrial value and represents a great competitive advantage. The patent puts our technology in a stronger position in our home market and internationally and, at the same time, lets us leverage our distinguishing know-how, built in over 10 years of committed research and development”
The history of Flash Balancing System, a long road to the patent
The company embarked on the road to obtaining the Italian patent for its proprietary Battery Management System in 2009 – even before Flash Battery was founded (it was Kaitek srl at the time), – when fate brought Marco Righi to visit the company of a friend of his that produced industrial electric vehicles.
During his visit, Marco noticed the first types of lithium batteries from China stacked in a corner of the warehouse. The potential seemed high, but there was a lot of room for improvement in the area of quality and performance. Wanting to know more, he decided to do his own research and purchased and analysed several lithium cells, carefully examining the electronics that managed these batteries.
Soon, he realized that the electronics were precisely the problem: the electronic system’s management control of these batteries was causing their reliability issues; the system was obsolete and harmful to the cells. To test his theory, Marco brought his friend and electronic engineer Alan Pastorelli on board and the house garage was soon turned into a research laboratory. Every night and weekend, cells were opened, observed and tested.
Archive image of founding partners Alan Pastorelli and Marco Righi at the first Kaitek srl headquarters
Together, Marco and Alan began designing their own lithium battery management system, which in a short time proved to be the solution to all the problems. Their system kept the lithium cells balanced and efficient, even in larger, higher-performance battery packs, delivering high stability and excellent performance. Named Flash Balancing System, this was the invention – now patented – that enabled Flash Battery to gain entry in the market as a manufacturer of safe and reliable lithium battery packs for the industrial sector.
Flash Battery System: what is it and how does it work?
Flash Balancing System, Flash Battery’s proprietary Battery Management System, is an industrial innovation significant enough to have been awarded Italian patent protection in 2022, a highly-coveted recognition in the field of technological innovation.
BMS: the brain of a battery
The BMS can be considered the brain of a lithium battery. It controls its countless activities – management of the operating data, range, safety, cell balancing and everything in between.
The importance of cell balancing
The BMS is responsible for properly balancing the battery pack and this, together with charge management, can be said to be one of its most important functions, essential to guarantee efficiency and high capacity throughout the battery’s entire life cycle.
The cells of a lithium battery tend to differ in capacity, resistance and self-discharge rate. These differences are small (for example, one cell might be at 100% while another one at 95%) but with time or extended use, can grow bigger and cause the unbalance to become more and more significant, enough to lower the general range of the battery and vehicle.
The limitations of conventional BMS systems
To prevent the loss of efficiency, conventional Battery Management Systems apply resistance to the cells with the greatest charge in an attempt to “lower” them to the level of the lowest cell. This method keeps costs down but has several limitations, including long balancing time (6 to 12 hours), gradual reduction of the available energy (due to the longer balancing phase, the battery is often put back to use before the balancing process has finished, causing a gradual reduction of the nominal capacity), and high maintenance costs, arising from the fact that components cannot be replaced on site if a malfunction occurs; the batteries have to be necessarily shipped back to the manufacturer.
The high-power electronics of Flash Balancing System
Flash Balancing System, the proprietary battery management system devised by Flash Battery and implemented in all its batteries installed around the world, was created with one aim in mind, that of overcoming the limitations of conventional BMS systems in order to bring a significant innovation to the lithium battery field and improve the state of the art in cell balancing.
Unlike conventional BMS systems, Flash Balancing System equalises the charge level in every cell via combined active-passive high-power balancing during charging as well as discharging, with a balancing current 20x higher than conventional BMS systems (20A). For Flash Battery lithium batteries this means ultra-fast balancing time and getting the maximum range out of every charge.
Some of its main strengths:
- Active and passive high-power balancing (20A)
- Short and predictable charging time (balancing time under 30 minutes)
- Active support for the weakest cells during discharge
- Full temperature control with two sensors on each cell
- Zero maintenance (the battery’s internal architecture and balancing combined eliminate the need for maintenance and allow performing any extraordinary servicing on site)
An innovation in the innovation:
Flash Battery’s patented Battery Management System doesn’t do cell balancing alone. It was designed to perform constant and comprehensive checks on every battery pack , that ensure stability over time, preventing faults and allowing for self-diagnostics and predictive maintenance.
It is a smart system that monitors every battery parameter in real time, sends and receives information to/from the vehicle, controls the battery charger, warms up or cools down the pack as necessary, and performs predictive analysis throughout the life of the vehicle. It can be defined as an “innovation that leads to more innovation ”, a self-learning system that can create new generations of ever smarter and smarter batteries.
“Our Flash Balancing System patent is the culmination of our 10-year-long effort to bring electrification to industry and make it efficient, safe and available for every kind of application imaginable. We knew lithium batteries had potential but they weren’t reliable. Our Flash Balancing System has made them not only reliable, but also intelligent, safe, high-performance, and long-life – in most cases they outlast the vehicles they power. The patent is also a crowning achievement for us, a great satisfaction of having invented something unique and revolutionary that has brought a real benefit to our sector.
The next steps: from the Italian to the European patent
The Italian patent is only one in a series of steps planned to protect our proprietary technology. Flash Battery has already taken action at the international level; in December 2020 it filed the European patent application for the architecture of its Flash Balancing System and has already received initial feedback from examiners. We are now waiting for the final response from the European Patent Office (EPO), expected this year .
Obtaining the European patent would enable us to extend the innovation underlying our Flash Balancing System to Europe, entitling us to exclusive rights in countries that today represent the cutting-edge in industrial electrification. These countries include Germany, France, Spain and Benelux, where we already have several excellence partnerships in place and which have shown clear signs of appreciation for the advantages of our proprietary technology.
The lithium battery sector is witnessing an exponential growth like never before. This is the right time to expand our position while protecting the identity of the Flash Battery brand and establishing the distinguishing characteristics of our technology in the market, as proof of the high quality level of Flash Battery lithium batteries for industry, our tailor-made industrial approach and the technological capabilities of the company. We are here because of an inventive idea and continue to march on, day by day, investing in innovation, R&D, and differentiation.
