Arbin’s new Precision High Power Battery Tester, developed in conjunction with Ford Motor Company and Sandia National Labs, has received the Special Recognition: Green Tech, Merit Award from the R&D 100 Organization. For more than 50 years, the R&D 100 Awards have served to recognize industry breakthroughs for new ideas and product developments.
By detecting minute signatures of battery degradation trends earlier, the Precision High Power Battery Tester provides valuable insights into the long-term future of a battery, allowing engineers to sort promising technology ready for new products from concepts that need additional refinement in the lab. Thus, this tester has the potential to dramatically accelerate the rate of battery technology development to help meet the growing worldwide demand for long-life automotive and stationary batteries – and, ultimately, usher in a new era of green technology.
One significant benefit of improved current and voltage testing precision is the ability to derive coulombic efficiency (CE) measurements on a large scale. CE testing is commonly performed in academia, but at a scale relevant for industrial battery performance the lower precision of existing testing equipment has precluded its use. CE is an aggregate metric, essentially how many electrons go into a battery versus how many are discharged. A high CE value denotes a battery with low loss, with a 1 (or 100%) denoting perfect utilization or efficiency. Low CE indicates losses due to side chemical reactions, heating of battery elements, changes in entropy, and other factors. The expected behavior of a battery’s CE over time is a power law decay towards 100%, as the initial CE losses of a lithium ion battery are greatest at the beginning of cycling (Figure 1). This expected behavior is seen in high precision testing but is obscured by imprecision in the case of a conventional tester. The Precision 25 was designed to measure current and voltage precisely enough to enable the CE equations to have meaning for industrially relevant life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIIdVZAej0s&feature=youtu.be
The Arbin High Power Precision 25 is the highest power high precision tester on the market at
200 Amps, an amperage relevant for electrified vehicle and grid storage applications. Arbin also
offers 50 Amp, 5 Amp, and 1 Amp models with better precision and better accuracy than known
competing technologies at these current levels. The High Power Precision 25’s analytical and research
applications include battery, capacitor, and half-cell testing; materials testing; quality control for
materials; and sampling of battery products for reliability.
To learn more about Arbin’s new High Precision hardware, please contact us!
