Batteries are integral power sources across a wide spectrum of modern applications, powering electric vehicles, industrial equipment, renewable energy systems, and portable electronics.
Its widespread application requires batteries to have reliable performance and service life. Battery testing equipment is a key tool to evaluate battery health, performance and reliability.
Especially in the process of battery production and the development of new battery technologies, battery testing machines can proactively identify potential defects and problems in batteries by accurately measuring key parameters such as capacity, internal resistance, and overall health, thereby avoiding potential damage and safety issues.
The Functions and Types of Battery Testing Equipment
Battery testing equipment serves diverse functions depending on the specific application and stage within the battery lifecycle, including research and development (R&D), production line testing, and field maintenance. Systems are designed to test individual battery cells, larger modules, or complete battery packs. The types of battery analyzing equipment often correlate directly with the parameters they measure or the tests they perform.
Key Measurement Parameters and Test Capabilities
Contemporary battery testing equipment offers a broad range of measurement capabilities to provide a comprehensive understanding of battery behaviour and condition:
Capacity and Discharge Testing
This process determines the total electrical charge a battery can deliver under specific conditions. Equipment facilitates comprehensive capacity measurement and can execute a full battery discharge, which is necessary for recycling processes. They also support discharging batteries to predefined voltage levels for safe transport. Key parameters such as overall battery voltage, current, elapsed test time, and capacity are typically monitored in real-time via integrated displays or software. Examples include the DV Power BLU series, which provides portable and universal testers for various battery types with voltages up to 1000V DC.
Internal Resistance and Impedance Testing:
Measuring a battery’s internal resistance or impedance offers insight into its state of health (SOH) and potential degradation. Techniques include DC pulse testing, such as the OhmTest™ based on IEC61436 standards, and AC impedance measurement, often performed at 1kHz.
Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) is an advanced technique used to study battery materials, aging mechanisms, develop models, and evaluate SOH either online or in service. Xiaowei offers EIS systems suitable for testing materials, cells, and stacks, incorporating software features like Autofit™ and multisine techniques to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
Voltage and Current Measurement:
Accurate voltage and current measurement is foundational to battery testing. Precision DC voltmeters offer very high accuracy for applications such as aging tests. Testing systems cover wide voltage and current ranges depending on the battery type and application, from microampere single-cell applications to kilowatt packs.
Self-Discharge Testing:
This test quantifies the rate at which a battery loses charge when idle, which can indicate internal defects. Monitoring the open circuit voltage (OCV) over time is a common method to observe self-discharge behaviour, as OCV decreases when the battery discharges. This process often requires instruments with high measurement resolution and excellent precision.
Temperature Monitoring:
Battery performance and safety are heavily temperature-dependent. Testing systems can measure internal, external, and ambient temperatures using sensors. Temperature data is crucial for characterising battery performance, understanding heat dissipation, verifying environmental conditions, and detecting anomalies that could lead to thermal runaway. Some manufacturers’ battery testing equipment is equipped with high-precision thermal sensors that can measure battery surface temperature differences as low as 0.025 K. This thermal test is used to ensure the accuracy of micro-resistance measurements and detect abnormal temperature rise in the battery module.
Environmental Simulation:
Testing batteries under controlled environmental conditions, particularly varying temperatures and humidity, is essential for evaluating performance and lifespan under different stresses. Environmental chambers are offered as accompanying solutions for turnkey battery testing. These chambers provide specific temperature ranges and, in some cases, humidity control. Xiaowei offers various environmental chambers, including the compact benchtop MHW-25-S (15 to 60 degrees Celsius) and high-volume freestanding models like the MGW-1000 (15 to 150 degrees Celsius) and MGDW-1000-70 (minus 70 to 150 degrees Celsius, 25% to 98% relative humidity).
Battery Management System (BMS) Testing:
The BMS is a critical component, particularly in electric vehicles, responsible for monitoring and managing battery pack conditions and performance.
Lifecycle Testing:
This involves repeatedly cycling batteries through charge and discharge protocols to simulate usage over time and determine their end-of-life characteristics, typically defined by a significant drop in capacity.
High-Speed Simulations and Drive Cycles:
For applications like Solid state batteries, batteries are subjected to highly dynamic charge and discharge profiles. Testing equipment can simulate real-world conditions using pre-recorded load signatures or programmable current/power profiles with high-speed data acquisition. Test equipment with this function needs to be customized by the manufacturer to support load testing under analog digital protocols (such as GSM, CDMA), with a step time of 50 microseconds, and can capture load data to simulate actual usage scenarios. Its advanced functions can even perform advanced high-speed simulation, support multiple curve types (time-current, time-power, time-load), and the data acquisition range can reach 5 milliseconds.
Safety and Installation Tests:
Ensuring the electrical safety of battery systems and installations is paramount. This includes testing parameters like insulation resistance, ground fault detection, and verifying the safety of electrical installations and charging stations according to relevant standards.
Physical and Geometrical Tests:
Beyond electrical characteristics, evaluating the physical attributes of battery components is also important. If your battery analyzer integrates a laser rangefinder and a vision camera, you can perform high-precision geometric measurements of battery size and flatness.
The Importance of Accuracy and Precision
Accuracy and precision are paramount in battery testing, particularly for long-term studies and predicting future battery performance. High-precision testing equipment is necessary to consistently detect tiny electrical anomalies and subtle trends that may otherwise be lost in measurement noise. Missing such data can hinder the conclusions drawn from test results.
Arbin explicitly states that measurement precision is more critical than control accuracy alone for long-term battery testing and projections. Superior accuracy and resolution allow for the measurement of smaller changes in voltage or other parameters, yielding results sooner and helping to separate high-quality batteries from those with internal defects.
System Considerations and Features
Selecting the appropriate battery testing equipment involves considering several system-level features:
Software Capabilities:
Comprehensive software is essential for data logging, management, analysis, and the creation of custom test programs. Advanced software suites, can manage large volumes of data and network multiple testing systems, and applied in data analysis and reporting.
Throughput and Scalability:
For large-scale battery manufacturing and R&D, it is essential to provide multiple independent channels or systems that can connect multiple units in parallel. Battery testing equipment with high-speed testing capabilities can achieve efficient mass production testing. As a leading battery manufacturing service provider in China, Xiaowei provides multi-channel solutions and systems designed for fully automatic production line testing.
Regenerative Capabilities:
Regenerative electronic loads and power supplies return energy discharged from the battery back to the grid. This significantly improves energy efficiency during testing, especially for high-power applications. Arbin’s RBT series and RBT-High Power testers utilise regenerative technology with regenerative efficiency exceeding 90%. Tektronix (EA) PSB and ELR series offer regenerative capabilities.
Safety Features:
Given the potential dangers of batteries, it is critical to maintain safety features on battery production lines. High-quality battery testing machines include multiple layers of safety protection, redundant algorithms, and built-in arc suppression in high-voltage applications. Some equipment also offers hydrogen detectors to prevent dangerous hydrogen accumulation.
Conclusion
For researchers, manufacturers, and maintenance professionals seeking to fully unleash the potential of battery technology, it is critical to select test equipment with appropriate accuracy, precision, functionality, and scalability.
Xiaowehttp://contacti has been continuously improving processes and improving technology, from basic capacity and resistance measurements to advanced electrochemical impedance analysis (EIS) and high-speed drive cycle simulation to meet the needs of new battery technologies and applications. Contact our professionals now to efficiently detect battery defects and ensure the rapid progress of the entire battery production and R&D process and bring it to market!