from chemistry to pack
The GB 38031 page sets out what the 2025 edition of China’s traction battery safety standard requires. This post asks two different questions: how would an engineering team actually go about passing it, and what have the big battery makers said publicly about where they stand? It deliberately does not repeat the test descriptions, so … Read more
When one cell goes into thermal runaway, whether you end up with a contained event or a pack fire depends on what its neighbours experience, thermally and electrically. This post sets out the heat paths that published test work identifies, what that work does and does not quantify, and the electrical effects, which get less … Read more
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
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
Current Sensor Drift and SOC Estimation Error Propagation This is a worked example accompanying Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) in Battery Design. It is the System FMEA example in the set, and deliberately chosen because it shows something the cell-level and pack-level examples cannot: a failure that originates in one subsystem (a sensor) and … Read more
Busbar Joint Failure Modes and Contact Resistance This is a worked example accompanying Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) in Battery Design. It works through a pack-level DFMEA line on a bolted busbar joint, a component that is mechanically simple but disproportionately responsible for field failures because it sits at the intersection of high current, … Read more
Separator Failure Modes and Internal Short Circuit This is a worked example accompanying Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) in Battery Design. It walks through a single DFMEA line at cell level in full, from failure mode to recommended action, using the separator as the subject. The separator is a good first example because it … Read more
Why Certification Alone Won’t Save Us Introduction Lithium-ion batteries power modern life, from the phone in your pocket to the electric vehicle in your driveway to the grid-scale energy storage facility humming at the edge of town. With this ubiquity comes an uncomfortable truth: these systems store enormous energy in compact volumes, and when they … Read more
Lithium-ion batteries are the backbone of modern electric vehicles (EVs) and energy storage systems, but their high energy density comes with severe safety risks. The primary threat is thermal runaway (TR), an uncontrollable, self-sustaining chain reaction where a battery’s heat generation vastly exceeds its ability to dissipate heat. During TR, internal temperatures can rapidly escalate … Read more
UL vs. SGS vs. TÜV Author: Max Khabur, Marketing Director ENEROC USA What Matters Most for Safety and Market Access? Published in recognition of National Forklift Safety Day, June 9 2026 Every June, National Forklift Safety Day serves as a reminder that material handling equipment is simultaneously one of the most productive and most hazardous categories of … Read more