What Industry Is Saying About the Battery ISC Device (Text Version)

The following is the text version of the video What Industry Is Saying About the Battery ISC Device.

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Matthew Keyser, Senior Engineer, National Renewable Energy Laboratory:"What we want to do is make all battery technologies safe for the consumers in the marketplace today."

Read On Graphic:  Battery Internal Short-Circuit Device. Making Batteries Safer

Dr. Said Al-Hallaj, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO, AllCell Technologies:"Lithium ion batteries today are actually state of the art.  They are the best energy storage solution in the market for such applications. If one cell fails, you're talking about thousands of cells that are in the system and such a failure is going to be really bad for the industry as a whole."

Read On Graphic:  Lithium-ion Batteries Power Cell Phones, Electric Vehicles, Aviation, Home Electronics. Even Astronauts' Spacesuits

Dr. Per Onnerud, Co-Founder and CTO, Cadenza Innovation:"One of the concerns that the industry has is that you get particulates from the manufacturing environment, and those can short out the battery.  If that happens you could have a potential fire."

Read On Graphic:  Rare Latent Defects in Lithium-ion Batteries Can Cause Short Circuits. And Catastrophic Failure

Said:"Addressing the safety of lithium batteries is at the forefront of the challenge to get lithium batteries in wider markets."

Matt:"The Battery Internal Short-Circuit Device is a device that's implanted into a battery. Once we figure out what happens inside of the battery, hopefully what we can do is design new safety measures for the battery - to ensure the battery itself does not go into thermal runaway."

Said:"Addressing the safety issue of lithium batteries is at the forefront of the challenge to get lithium batteries in wider markets."

Matt:"Many of the internal short circuit tests that exist today involve some type of external mechanism in order to force the cell to go into thermal runaway.  That's not a true internal short circuit."

Read On Graphic:  The Only Device that Produces a True Internal Short Circuit

Per:"You need to have reliable test tools that allow you to simulate what could actually happen in these types of incidents, and the tool NREL has developed is exactly that."

Matt:"The Battery Internal Short-Circuit Device in essence is a number of different metal components that are separated by a wax layer. We bring the temperature of the battery up to the melting point of the wax. Once the wax melts, the wax is then wicked away by the cathode and anode and the separator… and then, the metal components of the ISC connect to create an internal short within the battery."

Per:"We are seeing results that enables us to draw conclusions about thermal runaway… and we actually have been able to prevent that."

Matt:"You can control where in the battery the internal short circuit occurs, what the resistance of the short is within the battery and what type of short you actually put on it… but really, the most elegant feature is the fact that it's on-demand."

Said:"I truly believe that what I've seen so far gives this technology potential to be used to benchmark cells… It can be embedded within the cell easily and it can be done in a repeated and accurate way that reflects what actually happens in the scenario of an internal short circuit."

Matt:"It has also been used in batteries for vehicle systems, and the most recent testing we've been doing is with NASA for the man-maneuvering unit, which is basically the spacesuit the astronauts wear when they go outside of the International Space Station to do repairs."

Read On Graphic:  The Battery Internal Short-Circuit Device. Advanced, Accurate Testing To Improve Battery Safety.

Per: I think the most important potential with this device is it gives the industry something to standardize upon, and it's something I think the industry could embrace in the future."

Said:"This is something that we need to address to unleash the potential for lithium ion batteries to go in this energy storage market as a whole."

Matt:"It's very exciting to develop a new technology that's going to make batteries safer."

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