Applications
System Design
Design your system for the end of life. Ensure your capacity and thermal management system meet your requirements long into the future. Design your system to optimise this lifetime by understanding what causes it to degrade.
Scenario Analysis
Run scenario analysis backed up by real data. Model how your system will perform in any scenario - from cold climates to aggressive use cases.
Cell & Chemistry Selection
Use degradation data to decide what is the most appropriate format, chemistry or specific cell for you application. Browse how LFP compares to NMC and pick the most optimal for you.
Battery Management System (BMS)
Your battery management system needs to know how the resistance and capacity changes through lifetime for accurate State of Charge (SoC) and State of Health (SoH) calculations.
Key features
Trend analysis provided
Processing degradation data can be extremely time-consuming and prone to errors. That’s why we do the heavy lifting, ensuring you get straight to the interesting trend analysis.
Capacity fade computed
We compute the capacity of the cell at regular intervals during aging, and summarise the data in an easy-to-read table. The results are plotted for quick visualisation to compare degradation trends under different conditions.
Resistance growth analysis
We run advanced analysis on pulse testing results throughout lifetime to measure the multi-timescale resistance of the cell. This is summarised and plotted for your convenience, with even more analysis provided in .csv tables.
Reference Performance Tests (RPTs)
Our experiments are accentuated by reference performance tests (RPTs) that help track capacity fade, resistance growth and open-circuit voltage (OCV) behaviour. We conduct these tests at the beginning and end of life, as well as throughout the cell's lifespan.
Isothermal Testing conditions
All our experiments are conducted using our proprietary Peltier-based temperature control system, ensuring surface isothermal test conditions. At About:Energy, 25 °C is 25 °C.
Ageing blocks
Access the raw voltage, current, and temperature time series data through aging to ensure you have confidence in the accuracy of the data.
Wide range of operating conditions
We build our datasets to cover a wide range of operating conditions. Typically, we vary our degradation experiments over different currents, temperatures, and state-of-charge (SoC) windows to ensure we capture the true behaviour of the cell.
Cell teardown’s through lifetime
We use our unique capability to take the cells apart through lifetime. For a subset we measure the electrode properties including the open-circuit potential’s (OCPs).
Peltier Element temperature control
We use a proprietary Peltier element controller to accurately control the surface temperature of the battery throughout degradation. This ensures the battery stays at the temperature we want it to. At About:Energy, 25 degrees is 25 degrees.
High-repeatability
We repeat every experiment three times to ensure we capture the variance. Thanks to our Peltier temperature control, we achieve extremely repeatable results.
Pre-plotted for transparency
We provide a plot for every CSV file, saving you the effort. Quickly browse through the data to inspect its quality and ensure peace of mind.
Optional extras
Custom Validation
We can add custom data points to our test matrices to provide greater confidence in specific use cases. These custom data points can be shared publicly or kept proprietary for you.
Proprietary cells
We are trusted by some of the world’s biggest OEMs to keep proprietary data safe.
Downloadable as
What is degradation?
Battery degradation significantly affects key performance factors like range, fast-charging ability, lifetime, and safety. Understanding this degradation is crucial for optimising battery performance indicators, BMS algorithms, and making warranty decisions. However, battery cells degrade over years and thousands of cycles, meaning that high-quality, representative degradation data will always take great resources and time. This is a real challenge in the fast-paced battery industry.
Battery cell degradation is a complex process and the result of several coupled mechanisms. Cells, even from the same batch, can exhibit vastly different degradation responses based on external influencing factors.
Calendar time
Charge and discharge operation
Mechanical stress and pressure
Temperature and altitude
State-of-Charge and Depth-of-Discharge
Manufacturing inconsistencies
Teasing out the dependence of cell lifetime on the above factors requires careful designing of degradation experiments used to test a cell. This is because depending on the type of the extrinsic factors, the level of impact may be immediate or gradual, and can manifest as a different degradation mechanism and effect.
Repeatability is everything
Often degradation experiments result in high variance which is often assumed to be the cell performance. Our data has show that a significant portion of this comes from poorly controlled cell temperature. Check out how repeatable our experiments are - 3 cells for each.
