By Dr. Judy Jeevarajan,
vice president and executive director of the Electrochemical Safety Research Institute (ESRI)
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While conducting research on various batteries over the past several years, at certain points we heard about cases of lithium-ion batteries that experienced fire and thermal runaway during transport. Looking into it, we realized many of these incidents were connected to undeclared shipments, and almost always the quality of the batteries was very low. This led us to investigate more closely and discover that these batteries were counterfeit — that is, pretending to be a brand they were not — and therefore non-compliant to current safety standards.
Since many researchers procure batteries that can be obtained with a quick turnaround time and at a low cost, we decided to carry out more research in this area but procuring cells from online sources. Today we’d like to share some information with you on how to recognize and avoid dangerous fakes, ensure you purchase trustworthy, reliable batteries and chargers, and know what to do in an emergency.
Lithium-ion batteries tend to be highly specialized for their specific use in a certain device. This means oftentimes those that are from the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) are not available online and replacement batteries from the OEM are not available in retail stores. As a result, people have increasingly turned to purchasing replacements online, which is where counterfeit manufacturers have profited most. To be on the safe side, always order lithium-ion batteries directly from the manufacturer of your device.
This recommendation also applies to battery chargers. Using a generic or non-branded charger can cause thermal runaway in even a properly manufactured and certified battery. Lithium-ion batteries operate in different voltage ranges based on the chemistry of the components, so an incorrect or counterfeit charger will not know how to “talk" to the battery in the right way.
Counterfeit products pose many safety risks, as they may be prone to failure and cause fires and explosions. Discover more about how to detect and mitigate the risk of counterfeit cells. To learn more, download this white paper from Be Safe Buy Real.
Many manufacturers let you buy directly from their website, or they list trusted vendors of their batteries. If it is not possible to buy from one of these vendors, here are a few tips to guide your purchasing decisions.
Marks with a “UL” in a circle symbol, or “CE” for the European Union, indicate that batteries, chargers, and other products comply with national and/or international safety certification requirements. Counterfeiters will not bother getting their products certified, so if it does not have one of these marks, don’t buy it. Unfortunately, counterfeiters may also fake the mark, so the mark alone does not necessarily designate safety.
Familiarize yourself with the legitimate manufacturer’s design, and if you notice any significant aberrations, stay away from it. Counterfeiters can be very crafty. We have seen name brands on batteries that use the same logo and typeface but just change a letter or two — and most people do not notice.
You should find out what the original battery usually costs, and if you find something significantly cheaper, it is likely a counterfeit. It’s not worth risking your health to save some money on a potentially dangerous battery.
Look at the specifications on the original battery. If the new one you want to buy promises more power or longer endurance than what the OEM one stated, the sellers are probably trying to fool you.
While you may need your battery quickly, if you order it online and it is immediately available, something is probably not right. Remember, lithium-ion batteries are highly specialized for a specific purpose. An online vendor is not likely to have exactly what you need in stock.
This means the battery is not from the original manufacturer, and it will most likely not work properly in your device and is potentially hazardous.
If you are buying in bulk, e.g., not only for yourself but for an association or company, you should also consider verifying the serial number. Manufacturers and/or reputable suppliers should be able to verify the serial number of cells and batteries and inform about the dates when they were manufactured.
Many organizations collaborate on working to protect the consumers. The United Nations (UN), for instance, has strict regulations governing air transport of lithium batteries (Manual of Tests and Criteria, UN 38.3, 7th edition). One example of a UN requirement travelers may be familiar with is not being allowed to transport a power bank or laptop in your checked luggage. Law enforcement and airlines that carry cargo also keep an eye out for undeclared shipments that contain batteries, which is often in an attempt to avoid being caught as counterfeits.
Still, counterfeiters’ determination knows no limits when seeking new ways to slip past such controls. That’s why consumers also play an important role as a partner in the fight against counterfeiters: by avoiding purchasing their substandard products in the first place.
By learning about counterfeit batteries, consumers can help make the world a safer place. When you get into the habit of purchasing lithium-ion batteries the right way, you will also be a role model for younger people, for whom it will become second nature to keep an eye out for authentic and safe products.
While an important part of safety is prevention, there may be times when you need to act fast in response to an emergency. In extreme cases, there may be a hazardous liquid spill due to high temperatures and venting, smoke, fire, and thermal runaway.
If you happen to have a counterfeit or faulty battery and an incident happens, you need to know how to react correctly. Here are a few tips on what to do when a battery fails.
Now you know some ways to avoid dangerous fakes and the dangers they can pose. Want to learn more about the science behind battery safety and incidents that can occur around unsafe counterfeit batteries? Read the next part in this two-part series to learn more.
New battery plants are popping up like wild flowers all over North America, as automakers embark on one of their biggest building sprees ever, fueled by the multibillion dollar transition to electric vehicles. Legacy OEMs and start-ups are partnering with lithium-ion battery manufacturers such as AESC, LG Energy Solution Ltd., Panasonic, Samsung SDI and SK On.
LG Energy Solution alone plans to build eight factories in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee and Ontario that will supply General Motors, Honda, Hyundai and Stellantis. Those facilities, which will account for more than 300 gigawatt-hours of EV production capacity, will be massive plants that each comprise several million square feet of floor space.
Numerous EV battery plants will be built in North America during the next decade. Illustration courtesy Argonne National Laboratory
Battery factories require a new way of thinking about plant design and construction. Manufacturing engineers must pay careful attention to factors such as production flow, material handling, environmental control and fire safety.
Factories that mass-produce battery cells, modules and packs demand a different layout than traditional automotive facilities. For instance, they require multilevel mixing buildings that use gravity-fed production processes to transform raw materials into anodes and cathodes. Clean rooms are essential, and humidity control is extremely important. Battery facilities also typically require two to three times the electrical load of a conventional automotive assembly plant.
The unprecedented demand for EVs has triggered the rapid expansion of battery manufacturing facilities. Automakers and suppliers are investing billions of dollars in mega-plants that each span 3 to 4 million square feet and require 100 to 130 megawatts of power.
Engineers face many unique design and construction considerations. In fact, there are four major challenges that go hand in hand with the complexities of establishing an EV battery manufacturing facility:
Battery factories require a new way of thinking about plant design and construction. Illustration courtesy Bosch Rexroth Corp.
Achieving speed to market with an EV battery manufacturing facility is critical. To meet these demands, project teams must use a fast-tracked design, construction and equipment installation schedule consisting of overlapping and simultaneous tasks throughout the project. Early planning is imperative.
Your plan should be comprehensive from beginning to end. At the start, one of the first critical decisions is identifying the optimal site. Not finding the right site is a perfect recipe for derailing a project at the beginning.
If you pick the wrong site, your team will be fighting this decision through design, construction, startup and operation. Take the time to do a technical evaluation of the site, including permitting requirements, utility availability, topography and soil conditions, as well as the current and future labor force before you close on the property. Do not be seduced by the “best” financial incentives.
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Project teams must use a fast-tracked design, construction and equipment installation schedule consisting of overlapping and simultaneous tasks. Illustration courtesy Gresham Smith
Moving to the other end of the schedule, since EV battery manufacturing facilities require an extraordinary amount of specialized equipment that will be installed in phases, planning ahead for installation is also critical.
The first production line is usually installed to meet the extremely important sample production date. This means subsequent lines will be installed while product is being produced in a dry, ultra-low relative humidity (less than 1 percent) and clean environment.
This phased approach cannot be successfully accomplished without a well-developed installation plan from your design, construction and operation team.
Time and time again, it has been proven that a good plan will overcome poor execution. However, great execution will rarely overcome a poor plan. So, take time and move slowly at the beginning of your project. That will allow you to move much faster in future phases.
Finally, remember that no plan survives first contact with a project. In other words, your plans are going to change. Therefore, flexibility should be built into your team’s thinking, as well as your project plan, to quickly adapt.
Many battery manufacturers are based in China, Japan and other Southeast Asian countries. Your project team will be multinational, multilingual and multicultural, working from multiple time zones. Fostering effective collaboration among your team members and cultivating those relationships is crucial when working with a global team.
These are the people you will be spending the next four to five years with through the design, construction, commissioning, startup and operation of your facility. Therefore, it is essential to make the time and effort to pick the right team members with the necessary combination of experience, expertise and attitude who can work well together as part of a global team.
It is also vital that you are prepared to create and maintain a collaborative culture. Fortunately, we now have excellent collaboration tools for teams that are spread across the globe, such as:
Make the investment to become very comfortable with these tools and build in extra time for meetings. This is crucial, since bilingual and bicultural technical meetings will take at least twice as long as you would normally expect.
Electric vehicle battery plants are expensive. To effectively control both first- and long-term costs, it’s a good idea to focus on total ownership cost (TOC), which includes site, design, construction and operating costs.
Once you understand the entire cost and where the big money is—for example, the facility’s mechanical and electrical systems—you can start to drive down that cost. Saving a nickel here and a dime there while dollars are flying out the door is simply not the right way to approach such a complex endeavor.
Good early planning will also drive down TOC. While you can control cost at the beginning of a project as you make fundamental design decisions, once you enter into procurement and construction, you are no longer in a position to effectively save money. In fact, you are going to be spending money very rapidly.
It’s a good idea to focus on total ownership cost, which includes site, design, construction and operating costs. Illustration courtesy Gresham Smith
It is crucial that your team members have a budget target and have the necessary information to track costs and estimate on an ongoing basis. There are many good estimators in the world, but very few who can estimate effectively based on the limited amount of information you have at the early stages of design.
It is critical to have an estimating team that is capable of making rough-order magnitude estimates at the beginning of a project to help drive your early decision making.
Effective decision making is really important when it comes to cost control.
Design and construction is all about decision making. And, your project leadership must have the ability to make good decisions fast. Since an EV battery manufacturing facility often represents a joint venture between an automaker and a supplier, there is another layer of complexity added. Each joint-venture partner will have very different decision-making styles.
If you begin your project without having a clear idea of who is in charge, you’re starting off on the wrong foot and setting yourself up for confusion that will cause schedule delays and will cost money. The bottom line? Effective decision making is really important when it comes to cost control.
An EV battery manufacturing plant is much different than a traditional automotive assembly plant, because of the high-speed production processes that take place within a highly sensitive environment that needs to be meticulously controlled. Dense with equipment, these facilities must maintain ultra-low humidity and a clean room environment around the clock.
Battery plants are also different from other types of advanced manufacturing. For instance, clean rooms for semiconductor manufacturing are not dry rooms. They contain 30 times more humidity than the ultra-low requirements for battery plants. Uncontrolled humidity in battery plants will cause defects resulting in reduced product life and performance, overheating during charging and potentially thermal runaway, including fires.
Because of the ultra-dry and clean room environment required, you should start with a dry-clean culture mindset from the very beginning. This will pay dividends as you begin to certify the production spaces and install equipment. If done well, it will translate into the ongoing operational culture of your facility.
Battery manufacturing requires high-speed production equipment and processes that need to be meticulously controlled. Photo courtesy Volkswagen AG
In addition, you need to focus on training your personnel in how the overall building works as a system and make sure they fully understand its sensitivities. Before the plant is operational, develop a plan for a “soft production landing” in case things go wrong.
For example, your mechanical system will have certain outside temperatures that the system is designed to operate within. But, with increasingly common extreme weather events, it is not a matter of if you are going to get outside of the system design parameters, but a matter of when. Therefore, every EV battery plant needs an operational plan in the event of extreme weather.
That plan should include tracking incoming severe weather systems, closely monitoring your building systems and potentially ceasing production, and—since people are one of the main sources of humidity—pulling all personnel out of the clean and dry rooms until the storm passes.
Redundancy can be expensive. However, spending the time and money to understand where redundancy is prudent—on the front end of a project—can help avert disaster once a plant is operational. The consequences of making a “penny-wise, pound-foolish” decision will cost you five to 10 times more in the future. Ultimately, when you do not take the TOC into consideration up front, you stand to lose millions of dollars further down the line.
Finally, embrace a future-oriented mindset. The EV industry is still relatively new, which means new innovations are being made every day. The plant you are building today will someday need to support battery manufacturing for an entirely different chemistry from what is currently used.
Battery factories should be designed to optimize material flow, maximize productivity and reduce time to market. Illustration courtesy Gresham Smith
To help optimize material flow, maximize productivity and reduce time to market, it’s important to combine what are often individual buildings into a single, larger structure while maintaining appropriate fire separation and life-safety protections. This not only reduces the general site requirement area and the amount of conveyor systems needed, but also reduces the overall construction and operational costs of the project.
Also consider creating a “spine” that runs down the center of the plant. In an EV battery manufacturing facility, there are two separate parallel cathode and anode lines. This separation creates a natural location to include a central spine. This not only provides a circulation path for people and equipment, but also a utility distribution path that cuts down on the distances for all utilities feeding the process, which greatly reduces cost.
High-speed delta robots are used for battery cell coating applications. Photo courtesy BMW AG
Electric vehicles are driving a once-in-a-century change to our economy through the creation of an entirely new industrial ecosystem that is creating multiple opportunities at multiple scales all over the world. This systemwide change will continue to grow and evolve.
Establishing an EV battery manufacturing facility during this industrial and economic shift poses unique challenges that require careful consideration and strategic thinking. A highly aggressive schedule is crucial for achieving the required speed to market, and it necessitates early planning, comprehensive site evaluation and well-developed equipment installation plans.
Embracing a future-oriented mindset and incorporating innovative design concepts will enhance efficiency, optimize material flow and reduce construction costs. By addressing these challenges proactively, companies can position themselves for success in the rapidly evolving EV battery manufacturing industry.
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