
Understand and Prevent Battery Fires and Explosions – and Avoid Costly Failures Like the Samsung Note 7
Modern batteries (eg Li-Ion) contain hazardous chemicals & they heat up during use: this combination always has the potential to cause fires & explosions. This presentation will focus on improving the understanding of how these incidents occur, what can be done to avoid them & how the risk can be minimized during early stage design.
The Samsung Note 7 phone & Boeing Dreamliner airplane fires are very costly examples of how even large corporations fail to understand the potential fire risk of batteries.
The solution lies in knowledge of heat generation rate during normal use & information about safe boundaries such as temperature, discharge rate & overcharge, in realistic situations that represent actual use conditions. Data from commercial batteries of different types will be used to illustrate these points.
A relatively new technique will also be discussed with data, which allows total heat output during discharge to be measured on-line and this can be used both for design and battery modelling. Examples of the data will be provided.
This webinar will focus on the following key topics:
• Why battery fires & explosions occur
• How to design safer batteries though understanding of heat generation
• Video evidence of batteries under explosive conditions
• How better thermal management systems can be designed – based on heat measurement from isothermal calorimetry
• Laboratory instruments suitable for testing and data generation
Presenter
Dr. Jasbir Singh – Managing Director at Hazard Evaluation Laboratory
Jasbir is a chemical engineer specializing in thermal hazards and calorimetry, traditionally for the chemical industry but now increasingly involved in battery safety, especially Li-ion EV and related types.
A graduate of Imperial College (London), where he undertook PhD into combustion and explosions, his experience includes many years in process design for the chemical and petrochemical industries. He is currently developing test methods and instruments for use in design of battery thermal management systems.
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Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy and Its Application to Battery Analysis
Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) is a well-established experimental technique that has applications in coatings, corrosion, sensors, electrochemical double layer capacitors, batteries among others. The power of EIS partly comes from its ability to access a very wide range of frequencies (typically from MHz to μHz). For batteries, parameters such as the internal resistance, electrode surface capacitance and leakage are accessible at different frequencies across the spectrum. This allows EIS to gather all the relevant information with a single measurement. In this webinar, we will briefly introduce EIS and cover its application to batteries. We will talk about how to analyze typical data and how to gather the relevant information. We will further talk about available instrumentation and their limitations.
This webinar will focus on the following key topics:
• What is impedance spectroscopy?
• What can impedance spectroscopy do for Battery analysis?
• How can capacitance, internal resistance and leakage be determined using EIS?
• What are the instrumental requirements and limits?
Presenter
Chris Beasley – Gamry Instruments
Chris Beasley received a BS in Chemistry from Kutztown University in 2000 and got a PhD in electrochemistry from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. His doctoral dissertation was on using redox-active nanoparticles as supercapacitors. Chris joined Gamry Instruments in 2010.
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Preventing Li Ion Battery Failures From a Manufacturing and Design Perspective
How can you be proactive and make sure your cell supplier is the right one and you don’t end up with thermal events and field failures? Is it enough to qualify a cell manufacturer according to industry standards? The answer is that the majority of compliance based testing is related to abuse tolerance. However, the vast majority of field failures do not occur under abuse scenarios, but happen under normal operating conditions due to manufacturing flaws or design and system tolerance issues that cause internal shorts. In this webinar, you will learn about common lithium ion battery failure modes and how to be proactive in preventing these.
This webinar will focus on the following key topics:
• Gain an understanding of lithium ion battery failure mechanisms and the pathway to thermal events
• Learn how cell design impacts battery safety and reliability
• Learn the basic steps in a lithium ion cell manufacturing process, and how the process controls affect safety and reliability
• Come away with a checklist to qualify your cell manufacturer
Presenter
Vidyu Challa – Technical Director at DfR Solutions
Vidyu Challa is Technical Director at DfR Solutions where she works on battery reliability and safety issues. Dr. Challa helps customers with their battery challenges including design reviews, manufacturing audits and supplier qualification. She obtained a PhD from CALCE Electronic Products and Systems Center at the
University of Maryland. She has broad based expertise that includes engineering technology start-up experience, product development, R&D, and business development. Dr. Challa has published her work in journals, presented at conferences and written blog articles.
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Preventing Thermal Runaway in Energy Storage Systems (ESS)
From air transportation to electric vehicles and most recently “Hover Boards”, our industry is painfully aware of the over-discharge malfunctions associated with high-energy lithium-ion batteries, yet according to recent studies, nearly 70% of all Energy Storage Systems currently deployed are lithium-ion. Avoiding the pitfalls of utilizing greater energy density in larger installations is what will be discussed. Michelle will walk through the recent innovations from materials and process tracking in battery manufacturing to comprehensive control of cells in a fully deployed system. Incorporating lessons learned from recent failure investigations by the NTSB and FAA as well as new DoE mandates, Michelle will discuss how to achieve and in some areas surpass the new emerging safety certifications for a multi-megawatt energy storage system.
This webinar will focus on the following key topics:
• Making batteries safe or making safe batteries? (control & mitigation)
• Cell manufacture tracking, certification and response
– NTSB & DoE analysis and current situation
• Incorporating advanced battery management systems (BMS)
– Active cell dynamic balancing
– Cell replacement (hot-swapping)
– System reconfiguration
– Energy density scalability
Presenter
Michelle Klassen – VP of Business Development at Pathion, Inc.
Michelle Klassen is VP of Business Development for PATHION Inc. which manufactures high-performance, safe, and reliable Energy Storage Systems (ESS) for commercial markets ranging from 86 kilowatt-hours in stand-alone systems to over 1 megawatt-hour in containerized units. Prior to PATHION, as Vice President at ZeroBase Energy, she led the design and implementation of power systems and micro-grids for customers, including the US Department of Defense, Kenya Ministry of Energy and the L.A. Department of Water and Power.
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