FEATURE
off-highway, grid, marine, micro-mobility or anywhere else requiring custom-engineered battery packs and modules. Ultimately, we have the knowledge and experience
to help develop a project from concept through to industrialisation.
Can you share an example of how your battery expertise and industry insight informs decisions you’ve made? We’ll start with some fundamentals of our Synch project. In the volumes we’re working at now, there’s nothing special about the exterior of the battery - these parts are actually from the same supplier that Chris used previously. They’re a very standard format, called down- tube enclosures, available in a standardised range of thicknesses, heights, and lengths, that make up the various bike batteries you can buy on the market. Our component sourcing rationale for casings comes in two parts: 1) There’s no way to add significant value to the battery enclosures. 2) The cost element - these parts are where the tooling costs are really expensive.
In comparison, the distinction we have is the use of commercial cells. LG M50 cells are used in automotive environments. These are cells developed with applications such as mobility in mind. That last part is really important. You’ll be aware that there are a plethora of excellent Chinese cell manufacturers servicing every imaginable application and sector. What we need to be sure of is that we source appropriate components for our specific application.
Where might this approach not be the case - do you have an example? What you don’t want is to buy from someone (a business) who has, for example, taken a brilliant cell for, say, a vape, and thought, “I can buy these vape cells at a really low price - I’ll put them into a collection, call it a battery, and sell that cheaply.”
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Great cells used in an application they’d not been designed for won’t deliver the desired outcome. Sounds obvious but isn’t always considered.
It’s also why the cells we buy are at least three times more expensive than the cheapest options: Application-appropriate components - over spec if anything, given the auto industry requirement.
Your insight and experience inform and influence component and manufacturing decisions. We start with the LG M50 cells and apply our experience to integrate them in a way that is much more performance and durability-enhanced.
The welding process we use - ultrasonic wire bonding - allows us to individually connect the cell to what we have as a PC board. Getting into more detail, we have a PC board that is both the sensing and the conducting element for the battery. Then we connect it to a standard bike Battery Management System (BMS) which is, at this point, also the same as was previously used. Again, quality and cost efficiencies make this a smart business decision, and the right decision for the end user.
Now seems like a good point to tackle the elephant in the room: E-mobility, lithium-ion batteries and bad press - what’s the story here? When you look at e-bike and e-scooter fires, a lot of those come from the welding process which joins the cells to the busbars, creating the electrical path. So, we’ve got a document from a tear-down that one of our clients did, exploring a variety of battery fires in India. When they then tore apart the different batteries made by different companies, the upper-end units that were being used were made by companies like Ola in India. Batteries from Ola had a more robust assembly - they’re doing similar to what we are in terms of construction and manufacturing. However, the ones that were more prone to failures were where people had taken nickel strips and used resistive welding or MicroTig welding. A lot of companies in the UK still use these techniques because they operate as job shops using hobby equipment.
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