When designing a battery into an EV, you must perform rigorous testing to understand a battery’s performance. Electric vehicles (EVs) accounted for 13% of global vehicle sales in 2022 and are forecasted to reach 30% of global vehicle sales by 2030. The industry needs to continue working on making EVs affordable to support this transition…

Battery testing enables vehicle manufacturers, owners, and researchers to make informed decisions, optimize vehicle performance, and enhance overall user experience. Demand for electric vehicles is amping up. Every one of these vehicles needs large batteries, and the industry is responding by building plants. Energy.gov forecasts that by 2030 electric vehicle battery manufacturing capacity in North…

In a video, EE World spoke with a power-supply applications engineer about why RV batteries use such high voltages and how to test them. Batteries are perhaps the most expensive component of an electric vehicle. Typically producing 800 V to 900 V, batteries deliver the power needed move the vehicle. Of course, EV batteries need…

Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) is comprehensive. The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) defines MBSE as the “formalized application of modeling to support system requirements, design, analysis, verification, and validation activities beginning in the conceptual design phase and continuing throughout development and later life cycle phases.” It’s especially applicable to complex systems of systems like…

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology is often touted as one key to a more sustainable energy infrastructure. Like other areas where technology strongly impinges on economic and social interactions, however, the reality is complex and nuanced. Battery chargers can be a particularly daunting technical problem when implementing V2G. The charger must be bidirectional and offer high efficiency.…

By Ashok Lahiri, Enovix Corporation The first lithium-ion (Li-ion) bat­tery, developed and commercialized by Sony Corporation in 1991, provided a step-change increase in energy density for its handheld camcorder — a harbinger of the many power-hungry portable electronic devices to come. Without this battery innovation, the brick-size cell phone of the 1980s would never have…

A lot has been written regarding rechargeable lithium (LI) batteries and sustainability. Primary (non-rechargeable) Li batteries can also make major contributions to improving the sustainability of the systems where they are used. This FAQ reviews some of the factors related to the sustainability of primary Li batteries including key performance indicators (KPIs), downcycling versus recycling,…

By Pamela Mansfield, JEOL USA  As the market for renewable energy sources and electric vehicles grows, the need for reliable, high-capacity energy storage is increasing too. Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) fit the bill in many ways, but plenty of challenges remain ahead, such as understanding their microstructure. This article describes how scanning electron microscopy (SEM) can…

Power-generation and heating units using radioactive decay as their primary energy source have been successfully used in space and on Earth for over 60 years. Q: How much power does a single Pu-238 RTG core generate? A: The newest thermoelectric converters using PbTe/TAGS-based thermocouples can produce between 100 and 125 Watts of electrical energy from […]

Diamagnetism, paramagnetism, ferromagnetism, ferrimagnetism, antiferromagnetism, and superparamagnetism are the six kinds of magnetism. This FAQ begins with a brief review of the basic sources of magnetism, considers the magnetic susceptibility of various materials, and then briefly presents the characteristics of the six types of magnetism. The root cause of magnetism is the behavior of electrons,…