Management of intellectual property uncertainty in a remanufacturing strategy for automotive energy storage systems

Hartwell and Marco Journal of Remanufacturing (2016) 6:3 DOI 10.1186/s13243-016-0025-z Journal of Remanufacturing RESEARCH Open Access Management of intellectual property uncertainty in a remanufacturing strategy for automotive energy storage systems Ian Hartwell1 and James Marco2* * Correspondence: 2 WMG, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Abstract Legislative requirements are motivating vehicle manufacturers to produce innovative electric vehicle (EV), hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) concepts. End-of-Life (EOL) for the vehicle’s battery is often taken to be the battery having 80% retained capacity. Even at this lower threshold, there is still considerable inherent value embedded within the battery system. The extraction of raw materials through recycling and the use of the battery in second life applications are widely documented. In contrast, there has been relatively little research published that investigates the options and requirements for remanufacturing the vehicle’s battery system as one means of improving the efficiency of the overall production process. This paper addresses two of the barriers, often cited, that inhibit organizations from adopting a remanufacturing strategy—ambiguity regarding the meaning of remanufacturing and uncertainty in how to manage intellectual property (IP). Based on a critical review of UK law and legal decisions pertaining to remanufacturing, the authors propose a revised set of definitions for circular economy activities, exploiting the terms: warranty and design-life to provide a clear differentiation for remanufacturing. The authors also propose a new framework for managing IP uncertainty. The model may be employed by both original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to protect their innovations and remanufacturing activities and by independent organizations seeking to remanufacture OEM products. Keywords: Remanufacturing, Intellectual property, Circular economy, Transport, Electric vehicles, Energy storage Introduction One of the main drivers for technological development and innovation within the global automotive market is the need to reduce fuel consumption and the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). Legislative requirements are motivating manufacturers to produce innovative electric vehicle (EV), hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) concepts. In recent years, there has been considerable research published into the different designs and technology options that underpin the vehicle’s energy storage system (ESS). This includes the use of different battery chemistries [3], the design of the energy management control software [32, 58, 61] and the mechanical integration of the battery system within the vehicle [27]. The primary motivation is often to overcome the systems engineering challenge and to design an ESS with an © The Author(s). 2016 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Hartwell and Marco Journal of Remanufacturing (2016) 6:3 energy density and power density that will facilitate new vehicle concepts with a driving range and dynamic performance commensurate with consumer expectations. End-ofLife (EOL) for the vehicle’s ESS has been defined as the battery having 80% retained capacity (Ahmadi et al., 2014; [1, 11, 17, 46, 50]) and a doubling of a cell impedance from when it was new [58]. Many national bodies such as the Department for Energy (DOE) within the US and the Office for Low Emissions Vehicles (OLEV) within the UK employ such metrics to guide the automotive industry as to the length of product warranty and to incentivize consumer demand through the availability of vehicle purchase grants. However, a number of studies highlight the apparent arbitrary nature of these thresholds. It is often argued that even at 80% retained capacity, there is still considerable inherent value embedded within the ESS [35, 37, 46]. In addition to improving on-vehicle metrics of energy density, power density and component cost, there has been an increasing desire to better understand the sustainability of producing vehicles that contain embedded electrochemical energy storage. Much of this research has been guided by circular economy principles. In recent years, the term circular economy has come to embody any framework that advocates an alternative to the traditional linear economic model (make, use, dispose); retaining key resources within the supply chain for longer, extracting the maximum value from them whilst in use before embarking on a process of regenerating products and materials at the end of their service life [13]. Two of the primary concerns regarding the sustainability of electrified vehicles are the financial cost of the ESS and the associated environmental impact of the ESS during production, usage and recycling. The financial cost of the battery system is often cited as the primary barrier to EV production (Ahmadi et al., 2014; [17, 35, 37]). Research by [17], states that a 50% reduction in battery cost is required to equalize the economics of owning a PHEV as compared to a conventionally-fuelled vehicle. Conversely, [37] show that the EV powertrain cost must reduce from circa: $600–700 kWh-1 to $200 kWh-1 to achieve parity with comparable internal combustion engine (ICE) technology. Different mitigation strategies for lowering life-cycle cost through recycling and remanufacturing have been discussed. This includes the potential to save up to 20% of new battery cost through materials recycling and the use of remanufacturing techniques to offset up to 40% of new production costs [35]. The financial incentives associated with recycling different lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery chemistries is, however, not clear and is highly dependent on the chemistry employed [17, 37]. The Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) of electrified vehicles has been widely reported [25, 35, 37, 45, 50, 62]. Common scenarios include the use of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) or the use of the vehicle’s battery in 2nd-life applications in which different EOL batteries are aggregated together to form larger grid-storage solutions for meeting peak-power demand. One of the primary outputs from LCA is a better understanding of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with ESS production as§compared to in-vehicle use. A common view reported within the literature is that the sustainability of integrating resource intensive battery packs into vehicles is not clear. Embedding circular economy principles of reuse, remanufacturing and recycling is seen as on (...truncated)