Tech: Users Expect More from Batteries, but Don’t Expect Better Batteries to Deliver

Why We Still Need Intelligence to Regulate Battery Health, Safety, and Performance

By design, lithium-ion battery cells lose their energy capacity over time. You’ve probably noticed your phone’s battery loses its charge more quickly after a few years, or even months, of use. This isn’t a result of energy leaving the battery faster. Instead, this decay is caused by the natural battery aging process which reduces the amount of charge a battery can hold from 100 percent to 90 percent, and so on.

Moreover, consider a traffic jam on the freeway: when the road is flooded with cars, it takes longer for each driver to pass through, while increasing the likelihood of accidents and general road wear and tear. Similarly, developments like fast charging–popular for allowing electric vehicle users to rapidly charge their vehicle batteries in as little as 15 minutes–accelerate the aging process by overwhelming the battery with too much electrical energy. On the mobile side, 5G also poses a risk to these batteries by increasing the amount of data and overall usage devices support.

On the manufacturing side, while lithium in its ionic form is safe for use in batteries, poor use or faulty production can change the chemistry of the ions, resulting in the formation of lithium molecules. These molecules cannot return to their original state. Instead, they create chains of filaments within the battery. These filaments are not unlike a spider web of dangerous, easily conductible metals. When a battery short-circuits, it creates a lithium fire, a hazardous combustion that cannot be extinguished with water.

Why Can’t Batteries Just Be Better

If we know how and why these batteries break down, can’t we just create higher-end batteries? Unfortunately, producing a defect-free battery is difficult and costly for manufacturers. Given the rise of counterfeits, it has become nearly impossible to verify the authenticity of batteries without slicing them open.

To solve for all of these problem factors, we need intelligent battery software to diagnose and monitor the health of our lithium-ion batteries. Qnovo’s software acts like a doctor: examining a battery’s chemistry to spot lithium defects before they become dangerous, and readjusting the charging current and voltage to prevent problems from progressing.

The fact is lithium-ion batteries age regardless of how they’re used or created. As we increase our reliance on this technology to power our devices and vehicles, we must also ensure diagnostic standards are in place to give us a peek under the hood (or phone case).