The challenge of battery quality in electric vehicles
EV battery fire is still a major issue today. Every stakeholder concerned has brought up the necessity for safe & reliable batteries. The technical team at RC Labs has seen numerous instances when the client’s battery pack has not worked as intended. Both the quality of the cells and the method used to put a battery pack together can be attributed to this problem.
The team has been able to test out batteries with our intelligent battery management systems on bench before the pack is sent out for field testing; thanks to our unique algorithms and cutting-edge testing facilities. In one such instance, testing a two-wheeler OEM battery and cell produced the same outcome. The proprietary algorithms ran a series of tests on a 16 series battery. The BMS initiated a cut-off after detecting a high temperature alarm during discharge at 24A (1C), nominal rate for a NMC pack.
The temperature of a particular module in the pack increased to 55 degrees Celsius between 3000 and 4000 seconds of operating the battery using the RC Labs battery management system (BMS), according to the graphs below FIG. 1 and FIG. 2. (Note: In figure 2, the PIU shows a dip in temperature post 1500 seconds with the help of cooling fans). The same battery that was tested on the road might have sparked a catastrophic fire. The generated reports supported the vehicle OEM’s warranty claims and raised concerns about the reliability of the cells sold by the cell suppliers. The BMS’s ability to precisely identify flaws at the micro level ultimately aided the vehicle OEM and the cell suppliers in assessing the quality of the cells they offer.
With high quality hardware design and proprietary algorithms, RC Labs significantly decreased the likelihood of a battery fire on road. Our testing approach coupled with the product ensures that the vehicles and batteries being sold are of high quality.
Fig. 1: Measured Temperature plots at 12 points of the battery pack
Fig.2: Event chart
