Battery analysis and data collaboration

Fund integrated analysis and measurement methods that connect battery data across materials, components, cells, modules and complete battery packs. Projects should combine advances in methods with long-term collaboration across disciplines and sectors. The aim is safer batteries with high performance, long lives and designs suited to reuse and recycling.

If the project develops data-collection methods, analysis tools or software, these must follow FAIR principles: they must support finding and accessing data, combining data across systems, and reusing it.

A project can receive up to SEK 9 million and run for up to 30 months. Vinnova states that no co-financing is required from the consortium as a whole, but each organisation's grant is assessed separately under the applicable funding rules.

For companies, industrial research means seeking new knowledge to develop or substantially improve products, processes or services. Experimental development means using existing knowledge to develop new or improved ones. Maximum funding of eligible costs for small, medium and large companies respectively is 70%, 60% and 50% for industrial research, and 45%, 35% and 25% for experimental development. With an accepted bonus basis, the respective maxima are 80%, 75% and 65%, or 60%, 50% and 40%. These are ceilings; Vinnova sets each participant's actual rate in its decision.

Bonus grounds include qualifying collaboration, wide dissemination of results, and other grounds under Vinnova's linked funding rules. For example, collaboration between companies and research organisations can qualify when the research organisations bear at least 10% of eligible costs and can publish their own results. Collaboration between companies requires at least one small or medium company, or work in two EU countries or an EU and EEA country, with no company bearing more than 70% of total eligible costs. In both cases, independent partners must jointly define the work, contribute to it and share risks and results; buying research services is not collaboration. Other bonus grounds include wide publication through conferences, publications, open databases or open-source software, or an undertaking to license protected research results promptly at market prices on non-exclusive, non-discriminatory terms to interested EEA parties.

Non-economic activities can receive up to 100% of eligible costs. These commonly include non-economic work at universities and research institutes, such as independent university research. Offering goods or services on a market counts as economic activity regardless of legal form, public ownership or profit motive. Organisations doing both must keep separate accounts so that the grant does not benefit their economic activities.

Eligible costs include salaries, equipment and project-specific premises, external consultants and licences, necessary materials and travel, and overheads. Equipment costs are eligible only for the share and time used in the project. Consultant and licence costs are normally limited to 20% of each organisation's budget; Vinnova may accept a higher share for special needs, such as specialist expertise, if justified in the application.

Overheads normally cover actual costs up to 30% of eligible salary costs. Universities and higher-education institutions use their own full-cost accounting principle. A 45% ceiling applies to non-economic work by research organisations constituted as state-controlled limited companies or partnerships, research foundations where government appoints board members, and government agencies required to conduct their own research, provided they receive government funding for independent research. Economic work by those organisations remains subject to the 30% ceiling.

Projects are expected to contribute to all five result goals: better analysis and prediction of battery mechanisms; lasting collaboration and shared learning; links with national and European research and innovation; connections between detailed laboratory data and production or operating data; and training materials or open results that help organisations outside the consortium.

Vinnova can exceptionally allow a related organisation to supply consultancy or licences, for example where a group assigns responsibility for research to one legal entity but carries out the work elsewhere in the group. State and justify the arrangement in the application. Only the supplier's actual salary and salary-related costs can then be claimed, rather than a market consultancy fee. This exception does not permit purchases between project parties.