Our 2023

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As the year comes to an end, it is a good time to pause and reflect on the Ionworks journey so far. It has been a very special year for us: we incorporated in February and this first year has been full of learning, collaboration and growth. We launched our service portfolio providing customised enterprise battery modelling software and released our first product: the PyBaMM to MATLAB Simulink code converter. This tool seamlessly converts PyBaMM models into Simulink or Simscape blocks and helps to integrate our software across multiple teams and disciplines.

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This growth has not only been on the business side but also in our team as we welcomed two new Ionworks members earlier in the year. Eric Kratz joined as a Principal Application Engineer to bring his expertise as a theoretical chemist and software engineer, and Mark Verbrugge joined our advisory board bringing his invaluable experience of over 35 years in the automotive industry.

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This year we were awarded the Faraday Institution’s Entrepreneurial Fellowship, which allowed us to establish our presence in the UK and gave us the flexibility to focus on developing our first generation of battery modelling products. We are proud to remain an active member of the Faraday Institution’s excellent research community. We also graduated in the 2023 cohort of the world’s largest cleantech accelerator, Cleantech Open. The accelerator provided an invaluable opportunity to connect with like-minded entrepreneurs, investors and business leaders, and helped to shape our strategy for the year ahead.

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PyBaMM is at the core of our business, and at Ionworks we are committed to supporting its growth as an open-source project. As founders, we have continued contributing to PyBaMM as we transitioned to new roles at Ionworks. Since February, the Ionworks team has contributed 70 pull requests, 226 pull request reviews and over 250 responses to community questions posted in the project’s GitHub discussions. In addition to these direct contributions, we have also been closely involved with initiatives that help grow our community. This year we mentored teams at the first PyBaMM Hackathon (held in Oxford last March) and participated in the highly successful Google Summer of Code, providing mentorship and guidance to help develop the new generations of PyBaMM contributors and maintainers.

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Many of the Ionworks team’s code contributions added major features that enhance PyBaMM’s modelling capabilities. Some of our favourites are:

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• The Multi-Species Multi-Reaction Model (MSMR), a porous electrode model that includes multiple lithium-insertion species
• New experiment steps to allow greater flexibility in how experiments are constructed and define
• Several improvements in pouch cell thermal models, allowing the simulation of more complex cooling scenarios and improving the code quality
• Empirical hysteresis models for exchange-current density and particle diffusivity to account for different behaviour during charge and discharge

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We believe that 2024 will be an even more exciting year for Ionworks, so watch this space!

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