The electric vehicle (EV) battery is one of the critical automotive technologies that have successfully scaled to support the e-mobility boom. Hwee Yng Yeo at Keysight Technologies shares her insights on ensuring quality of EV batteries from blueprint to production – in this Part 2 of a two-part commentary.
* Check out Part 1 here.
Design and test for battery cells and high-power battery packs are important in ensuring the quality of EV batteries from blueprint to production.
Once a new battery cell design is ready, it enters the mass production step, which is evolving rapidly.
According to a McKinsey report, if demand for battery cells continues to increase at 30% annually, the global market will need another 90 gigafactories, as of current capacity, to support vehicle electrification over the next decade.
Cell cycling and aging are the most time-consuming stages of the complex battery cell manufacturing process.
As the Americas and Europe catch up with China and Korea to manufacture electric vehicle batteries closer to their end markets, billions of dollars are poured into ramping up gigafactory production, which is a complex process, as illustrated above.
There are many set-up challenges for a gigafactory, including location, budget, access to raw materials, manufacturing systems, and human resources.
About the Author: Hwee Yng Yeo is an advocate for clean tech innovations and works with Keysight’s e-mobility design and test solutions team to connect end-users in this complex energy ecosystem with solutions to enable their next innovation. She is a solutions marketing manager with Keysight’s automotive and energy portfolio. Before joining Keysight Technologies and formerly Agilent Technologies, Hwee Yng was a news journalist with a passion for the environmental and sustainability beat. She graduated from the National University of Singapore with an Honors degree in Botany, with special interest in ecology. In her free time, Hwee Yng works with NGOs in the Philippines to support low-cost off-grid electrification and livelihood technical training programs.
However, let’s focus on the intricacies of building better batteries from the cell-level up.
In any high-volume manufacturing environment, throughput is a vital barometer of productivity.
In the Lithium-ion cell manufacturing process, the cell formation and aging stages are the most time-consuming.
During cell aging, manufacturers must measure the cell’s self-discharge rate even when it is not connected to any device.
The purpose is to sieve out errant cells that exhibit abnormal or excessive self-discharge, since such “bad” cells adversely affect the performance of modules and packs.
A cell can take days, weeks, or months to exhibit its self-discharge characteristics.
However, in a time and cost-sensitive manufacturing environment, the traditional way of tracking self-discharge over time is not practical.
Instead, some manufacturers now use a relatively new potentiostatic measurement method to directly measure the cell’s internal self-discharge current.
This method typically takes hours or less compared with the traditional method of waiting for days or weeks to log the cell’s self-discharge performance, thereby saving time and precious floor space for holding the cells for this vital quality gate check.
Future-proofing battery test technology
As vehicle electrification continues to build momentum, battery developers and manufacturers must pre-empt new requirements in their battery testing capabilities.
These include planning for equipment that can handle higher cell capacity, and source / sink larger currents, with regenerative power capabilities to lower operating costs.
Some manufacturers are also adopting modular and location-independent “superchambers” to reduce their battery test investment time and costs, while allowing them the ability to scale up for rapid deployment in tandem with demand.
These exciting innovations will undoubtedly help to further scale the development and production of better batteries to power the adoption of electric vehicles.
New technology is creating more powerful battery cells that can charge faster.
These cells need to undergo cycling, where cell samples are tested to determine the cell’s cycle life and how the charge rate affects the cell’s life. As cell capacity quickly increases, researchers, and manufacturers, need to source and sink larger currents.
To circumvent costly power consumption, modern cell cyclers employ regenerative power, where power regenerated during cell discharge is recycled back to the grid, thereby reducing net energy consumption to lower your operating costs.
This process also generates less heat in the electronics, reducing the need to remove heat from the production facility.
Tags: battery, byline, commentary, EV, interviews, Keysight, opinion, Tech Focus, technology
This entry was posted on Friday, March 15th, 2024 at 5:00 pm and is filed under battery, Brief, Keysight, Motoring, Opinion, Reference, Tech Focus, VehTech, Wiki. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Tech Focus: EV Battery Design – Innovating for Longer Range and Battery Life (Part 2 of 2)
The electric vehicle (EV) battery is one of the critical automotive technologies that have successfully scaled to support the e-mobility boom. Hwee Yng Yeo at Keysight Technologies shares her insights on ensuring quality of EV batteries from blueprint to production – in this Part 2 of a two-part commentary.
* Check out Part 1 here.
Design and test for battery cells and high-power battery packs are important in ensuring the quality of EV batteries from blueprint to production.
Once a new battery cell design is ready, it enters the mass production step, which is evolving rapidly.
According to a McKinsey report, if demand for battery cells continues to increase at 30% annually, the global market will need another 90 gigafactories, as of current capacity, to support vehicle electrification over the next decade.
Cell cycling and aging are the most time-consuming stages of the complex battery cell manufacturing process.
As the Americas and Europe catch up with China and Korea to manufacture electric vehicle batteries closer to their end markets, billions of dollars are poured into ramping up gigafactory production, which is a complex process, as illustrated above.
There are many set-up challenges for a gigafactory, including location, budget, access to raw materials, manufacturing systems, and human resources.
About the Author: Hwee Yng Yeo is an advocate for clean tech innovations and works with Keysight’s e-mobility design and test solutions team to connect end-users in this complex energy ecosystem with solutions to enable their next innovation. She is a solutions marketing manager with Keysight’s automotive and energy portfolio. Before joining Keysight Technologies and formerly Agilent Technologies, Hwee Yng was a news journalist with a passion for the environmental and sustainability beat. She graduated from the National University of Singapore with an Honors degree in Botany, with special interest in ecology. In her free time, Hwee Yng works with NGOs in the Philippines to support low-cost off-grid electrification and livelihood technical training programs.
However, let’s focus on the intricacies of building better batteries from the cell-level up.
In any high-volume manufacturing environment, throughput is a vital barometer of productivity.
In the Lithium-ion cell manufacturing process, the cell formation and aging stages are the most time-consuming.
During cell aging, manufacturers must measure the cell’s self-discharge rate even when it is not connected to any device.
The purpose is to sieve out errant cells that exhibit abnormal or excessive self-discharge, since such “bad” cells adversely affect the performance of modules and packs.
A cell can take days, weeks, or months to exhibit its self-discharge characteristics.
However, in a time and cost-sensitive manufacturing environment, the traditional way of tracking self-discharge over time is not practical.
Instead, some manufacturers now use a relatively new potentiostatic measurement method to directly measure the cell’s internal self-discharge current.
This method typically takes hours or less compared with the traditional method of waiting for days or weeks to log the cell’s self-discharge performance, thereby saving time and precious floor space for holding the cells for this vital quality gate check.
Future-proofing battery test technology
As vehicle electrification continues to build momentum, battery developers and manufacturers must pre-empt new requirements in their battery testing capabilities.
These include planning for equipment that can handle higher cell capacity, and source / sink larger currents, with regenerative power capabilities to lower operating costs.
Some manufacturers are also adopting modular and location-independent “superchambers” to reduce their battery test investment time and costs, while allowing them the ability to scale up for rapid deployment in tandem with demand.
These exciting innovations will undoubtedly help to further scale the development and production of better batteries to power the adoption of electric vehicles.
New technology is creating more powerful battery cells that can charge faster.
These cells need to undergo cycling, where cell samples are tested to determine the cell’s cycle life and how the charge rate affects the cell’s life. As cell capacity quickly increases, researchers, and manufacturers, need to source and sink larger currents.
To circumvent costly power consumption, modern cell cyclers employ regenerative power, where power regenerated during cell discharge is recycled back to the grid, thereby reducing net energy consumption to lower your operating costs.
This process also generates less heat in the electronics, reducing the need to remove heat from the production facility.
Tags: battery, byline, commentary, EV, interviews, Keysight, opinion, Tech Focus, technology
This entry was posted on Friday, March 15th, 2024 at 5:00 pm and is filed under battery, Brief, Keysight, Motoring, Opinion, Reference, Tech Focus, VehTech, Wiki. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.