from chemistry to pack
Charlie Hawkins
An ICP-OES/XPS Root-Cause Workflow Investigation of Catastrophic Battery Failures walks through one forensic case study of field failures in e-bikes and e-scooters. This page covers a narrower question that sits underneath a lot of those investigations: when a cell has aged badly or failed and cathode transition-metal dissolution is on the suspect list, how do … Read more
2026 OEM Claims vs. Actual Dates Every major automaker and cell maker working on solid-state batteries has, at some point, put a year on when a real customer will be able to buy a car with one inside. Those years keep moving. This post lines up the current public claims from five of the most … Read more
Every solid-state chemistry roundup mentions that cells need “stack pressure,” usually as a single line in a spec table. What that line means for the person actually designing the pack around the cell: This gets skipped almost everywhere. This is the pack-design follow-on to our cell-level piece on What’s the right stack pressure?, which covers … Read more
Energy density gets the headlines, but the reason solid-state cells are still confined to pilot lines and demonstrator vehicles has as much to do with the factory as the chemistry. Building a gigafactory for a solid-state cell is not simply “the same lithium-ion line with a different electrolyte fill step”. Several of the core unit … Read more
Choosing a solvent blend or additive package is fundamentally a search problem: a handful of components, each at a continuous concentration, combine into a space with far more candidate formulations than anyone could test by hand. The Electrolyte Solvent Ratios and Electrolyte Additives pages describe what’s in that space and why each component matters. This … Read more
Most EV battery packs are disassembled by hand today: a technician discharges the pack, then works through fasteners, wiring harnesses, adhesive joints and potting compound one pack at a time. It’s slow, and it puts a person directly next to a charged pack that may be several hundred volts. Recycling Processes and Recycling Process Engineering … Read more
The Venting and Physics of Thermal Runaway pages describe cell venting qualitatively: gas builds up inside the cell, a burst disc or crimped vent opens once a threshold pressure is reached, and hot gas and electrolyte aerosol are ejected. This post works through the same event quantitatively, how fast the gas actually leaves the cell … Read more
An HV battery pack’s isolation from the vehicle chassis is normally maintained by design, but a monitoring circuit still has to watch for it failing in service: a chafed wire, a component drifting out of spec, or moisture ingress can all drop the barrier low enough to become a shock hazard. That is the job … Read more
Lithium dendrites growing through a solid electrolyte do not behave like the diffuse, roughly uniform plating seen at a liquid electrolyte interface. In a polycrystalline ceramic or a cold-pressed sulfide pellet, the microstructure itself dictates where lithium goes: dendrites overwhelmingly nucleate and propagate along grain boundaries rather than through the bulk of individual grains, even … Read more
Lamination bonds the separator directly to both electrode faces using heat and pressure to soften a thin adhesive coating already on the separator before the electrode stack is built. Rather than leaving the separator as a free-floating layer held in place only by winding tension or external pack clamping. Why Bond the Separator to the … Read more