The 1,000-Mile Electric Vehicle Battery Can Now Be Designed in Seconds Instead of Weeks.

Physivitis Ltd is announcing the launch of PBPF-IDO, the Physivitis Battery Performance Framework Integrated Design Optimiser. PBPF-IDO is a web-based engineering tool that solves one of the hardest problems in electric vehicle development: choosing the right battery pack design when half a dozen physical constraints all push in different directions. The tool is available now through the Physivitis licensed portal.

Until today, the kind of multi-physics optimisation that PBPF-IDO performs was available only to a handful of giant cell manufacturers with their own internal software teams, or to anyone willing to pay tens of thousands of pounds per seat per year for generic engineering software that was never designed for batteries. PBPF-IDO closes that gap.

What PBPF-IDO Does

Designing a battery pack for an electric vehicle is a problem with too many moving parts to solve in your head or on paper. The engineer has to balance five things at once: how far the vehicle needs to go, how much power it needs to deliver, how much the battery is allowed to weigh, how much it can cost, and how many years it has to last. Push any one of those harder and another usually gets worse. A heavier battery gives more range but raises cost and stresses the chassis. A cheaper chemistry lasts longer but cannot deliver as much peak power. A more advanced chemistry weighs less but can cost four times more and is harder to source.

PBPF-IDO does the maths across all five constraints and across five candidate battery chemistries simultaneously, then tells the engineer which combination produces the lightest pack that meets every requirement. It also identifies the single design choice that would deliver the biggest improvement if the engineer could change it. That second output, which battery engineers call binding-constraint sensitivity, is the part that saves real time. Instead of trying ten options to see which works best, the engineer is told directly: "the parameter limiting your design is your drag coefficient; reduce it by ten percent and you save eighty kilograms of battery."

All of this happens in about two seconds, in any web browser, with no installation required.

The Most Important Benefit

PBPF-IDO is a force multiplier for battery engineers. The single most important benefit is time. Analysis that previously took a competent engineer one to two weeks of switching between vehicle dynamics tools, electrochemical spreadsheets, and pack architecture estimates can now be completed in under an hour. The engineer who would otherwise spend a week comparing options can spend an hour and use the other four working days on the parts of their job that actually require human expertise.

This matters because the global pool of engineers capable of doing rigorous battery pack design is far smaller than the demand for them. There are approximately 5,000 such engineers worldwide, against more than 200 active electric vehicle programmes plus hundreds of cell development projects. Engineers are the bottleneck. Any tool that turns one capable engineer into the equivalent of five is genuinely valuable in a market that cannot hire its way out of the shortage.

Who Will Benefit

PBPF-IDO is built for any organisation designing electric vehicles or battery packs that does not have a 50-person internal software team. The first wave of beneficiaries falls into eight clear groups.

• Electric vehicle startups and challenger brands. There are more than 200 active EV programmes globally outside the top five established carmakers, with concentrations in China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, India, and South Korea. These teams typically employ 5 to 50 engineers and have neither the time nor the budget to build internal pack-design software.
• Battery cell and pack manufacturers below the top tier. Roughly 50 cell manufacturers globally produce automotive-grade lithium-ion cells; only the top five have internal multi-physics design tools. The other 45 are direct beneficiaries.
• Tier-1 automotive suppliers. Approximately 30 major Tier-1 suppliers worldwide design battery management systems and pack architectures for OEM customers. Companies including Bosch, Continental, Denso, Hitachi Astemo, ZF, Aptiv, Marelli, Valeo, and Mahle all need rigorous pack-level analysis.
• Electric aircraft and eVTOL developers. There are approximately 40 active electric aviation programmes worldwide, including Joby, Archer, Lilium, Vertical Aerospace, Eviation, Wright Electric, Heart Aerospace, and Rolls-Royce Electrical. Aircraft battery design is even more weight-sensitive than automotive.
• Defence and heavy-duty electric vehicle programmes. Several dozen government and contractor programmes worldwide are developing electric military vehicles, electric trucks, and electric marine platforms.
• Battery engineering consultancies. There are approximately 500 specialist battery consultancies globally. PBPF-IDO is a direct revenue tool for them: they bill clients for analysis that PBPF-IDO accelerates by an order of magnitude.
• University and government research laboratories. Approximately 300 university and national laboratory groups worldwide work on next-generation battery research and need accessible multi-physics design tools.
• OEM advanced engineering and innovation teams. Within the established carmakers, advanced engineering groups are constantly evaluating new chemistries and pack architectures for future model programmes.

Adding these groups together, the addressable population of professional engineers and research scientists who would benefit directly from PBPF-IDO numbers between 25,000 and 40,000 individual potential users, distributed across more than 1,000 organisations in approximately 30 countries.

Why It Is Unique and New

PBPF-IDO is unique on three independent axes.

First, the integration is new. Plenty of tools exist for vehicle dynamics, plenty exist for electrochemical cell modelling, and plenty exist for pack architecture analysis. No commercial tool, until now, combines all three into a single coupled optimisation. PBPF-IDO is the first commercially available tool to perform this integrated computation in a single pass.

Second, the binding-constraint sensitivity output is new. Other tools tell the engineer the answer; PBPF-IDO tells the engineer the answer plus a ranked list of which design parameter to attack next for the biggest improvement. That second output is what working engineers actually need.

Third, the access model is new for this category of tool. Until today, multi-physics battery design software was either free academic code with limited capabilities, or enterprise engineering bundles starting at fifteen thousand pounds per year per seat. PBPF-IDO sits at one thousand five hundred pounds per month, runs in any web browser, and delivers usable analysis within five minutes of first sign-in.

PBPF-IDO is built on the Physivitis Battery Performance Framework, a multi-layer engineering methodology developed by Physivitis Ltd over the past 18 months. The methodology and the underlying integration architecture are subject to UK patent applications.

Availability

PBPF-IDO is available immediately through the Physivitis licensed portal at portal.physivitis.tech. Two access tiers are offered. Professional Monthly is priced at one thousand five hundred pounds per month, with no minimum term and the option to cancel at any time. Professional Annual is priced at fifteen thousand pounds per year, saving three thousand pounds against twelve months of monthly access, with priority email support and an onboarding call included.

Enterprise pricing is available by request for organisations requiring multi-seat licences, custom chemistry libraries, dedicated technical support, or annual volume agreements.

For licensing enquiries: licensing@physivitis.tech
For general information: contact@physivitis.tech