High-quality batteries are designed to provide consistent power output over their lifespan, which is crucial for devices that are sensitive to voltage drops.
Battery quality also has important impacts on questions around battery reuse and recycling 122. While energy retention is an important metric to determine suitability for reuse, the presence of cell failure and defects arguably should be the primary gating item for this decision.
Fundamentally, the challenge of ensuring battery quality is driven by the complexity of battery performance. An especially important, sensitive, and complex pillar of battery performance is battery lifetime and failure.
While battery quality control is a multifaceted problem worthy of its own article, a key element is inspection. Battery inspection techniques can identify process failures before defective cells leave the factory and provide a snapshot into manufacturing performance.
Battery inspection techniques can identify process failures before defective cells leave the factory and provide a snapshot into manufacturing performance. In short, better inspection has a critical role to play in solving the battery quality challenge. A key consideration in inspection for battery quality control is which techniques to use.
Are batteries safe?
However, batteries are both difficult to produce at the gigawatt-hour scale and sensitive to minor manufacturing variation. As a result, the battery industry has already experienced both highly-visible safety incidents and under-the-radar reliability issues—a trend that will only worsen if left unaddressed.
Under this definition, poor quality means that the as-built cells deviate substantially from their design. This definition of battery quality is more general since it can include dimensional specifications and electrochemical properties as well as the lack of physical defects. Poor conformance has a number of impacts on the final product.