How to Set the Foundation For Successful Lithium Battery Integration
Lithium battery integration is one of the biggest hurdles in building electrified products. The battery industry is still the Wild West, and most companies don’t have the institutional knowledge or historical data to guide their decision-making.
But there’s a method to the madness.
Before digging into the highly technical stuff like battery chemistry, you must set the foundation by understanding requirements and aligning technical and business decisions. Simply put, you must figure out what battery you need, how much you need, and where you get it from. Here’s how.
1. Understand user and battery behaviors
Like all product development projects, you must address customer needs and market demand. It’s particularly critical when deciding how to balance power requirements with cost, size, and weight. For example, if you dimension a battery to support features users don’t need, you risk driving up costs and increasing technical challenges without the expected payoff.
There’s an abundance of market and user research resources, so let’s not dwell on the basics. They’re enough to help you get started — but product design is an iterative process, and it’s critical to have valid data to support continuous improvements and enhancements.
Let’s assume you have defined customer requirements and market demand. You know what your product should do, whether it runs on electricity or a coal-powered steam engine. The missing piece of the puzzle is: How does the battery pack behave in real-world situations when performing the required tasks?
You can get the insights to inform decisions and refine your solution by combining data on user behaviors with data about battery/cell behaviors.
Your battery solution should provide the capabilities to collect battery telemetry required by your specific application. For example, if you produce last-mile delivery vehicles, you should know how much energy is used during a typical shift, the impact of worst-case load in worst-case traffic, how lead-footed operators affect energy use, the impact of varying weather conditions, etc.
Then, you need an analytics layer to generate insights and reports. Finally, create a feedback loop where insights from the data analytics inform the cells’ future behaviors.
Some solutions on the market claim to provide data and analytics, but they aren’t created equal. The devil is in the details — not only do you need to collect the right information. The data must also be accurate, frequent, and granular to inform decision-making.
Using data analytics to inform optimization is at the core of software-defined battery (SDB) solutions. Our technology uses AI and machine learning to turn battery telemetry into actionable insights and automatically implement them to adjust cell behaviors on the fly.
2. Research your options
Electrification requires complex, multi-faceted decision-making. Highly technical parameters like power density, internal resistance, temperature sensitivity, etc., are interwoven with high-level strategic decisions. Your battery solution must meet practical, strategic, financial, and technology requirements.
Additionally, lithium batteries are volatile — adequate research is critical to ensure safety. You may do your homework at this early stage or spend more to buy yourself some margins later.
SDBs may come in handy: The software abstracts the inner workings of the battery from the application layer, so engineering teams don’t have to worry about cell behaviors, safety, or telemetry. For example, the Tanktwo Battery Operating System (TBOS) can automatically adapt based on operating conditions and pre-defined parameters, so users don't have to know all the requirements or have all the analytics upfront.
We do have a word of caution: An engineering team may default to a battery pack they have worked with and know best, especially if timelines or resources are tight. Don’t settle on a solution without proper research — battery technology is fast-evolving, and what was cutting-edge last year may not be the best option today.
Consider getting vendor-agnostic, unbiased recommendations from a third-party consultant who lives and breathes battery technology to guide your decision.
3. Bridge technical and business decisions
Battery life and performance may vary widely depending on the use case, manufacturing variations, storage time and conditions, charging and discharging profiles, operating conditions, etc. In most cases, non-technical decision-makers must weigh in to make the appropriate trade-offs and ensure the solution meets business requirements.
The decision-making process sits at the intersection of technical, operational, and market requirements. But presenting all the technical details to non-technical stakeholders isn’t the most effective way to guide the conversation. How do you turn a battery decision into a business decision?
Let’s consider how Turbotax takes a lot of complicated data and simplifies it into a rather linear decision-making process to help users optimize the outcome. For example, you can look at the audit-o-meter and choose how aggressive to go on your deductions.
In battery decision-making, you should distill telemetry and other data into tangible insights relating to market requirements such as longevity, performance, cost, etc. By abstracting the technical details, you give leadership the parameters they understand and care about to make decisions on.
For instance, if they dial up the longevity-o-meter, you should be able to demonstrate the trade-offs in, say, product performance.
How can you get those insights? There are no shortcuts — you can do the analytics in-house, hire someone to do it for you or buy the technology to automate the process of establishing the “xxx-o-meters” and their dependencies. Additionally, you should be able to collect battery telemetry and forecast future behaviors to inform ongoing improvements.
Don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis. We can help you make meaningful progress in selecting your battery solution and designing an integration strategy in a day in our new Battery Strategy Workshop. Learn more to see how we can help you build electrified products cost-effectively with cutting-edge insights and deep industry knowledge.
