We now know that lithium-ion batteries are unstable and may overheat, although this seldom ever happens. Nonetheless, we were most interested to hear of a temperature-sensitive battery tape, that gives an early warning when a particular cell overheats. This sounds so logical we wondered why all batteries don’t come with this feature as standard.
More About This Battery Tape Sensitive to Temperature
The U.S. electronics manufacturing company describes their product as a ‘distributed temperature monitoring technology’. It claims this ‘helps improve the detection of localized cell overheating’. And thereby increases battery lifetime by providing thermal runaway protection. Moreover, they add that their product:
- Integrates easily with existing battery management systems.
- Without a need to calibrate the tape, nor interpret any report.
- The product has integrated pressure sensitive adhesive for attaching.
- Plus it meets the AEC-2000 standard for passive stress resistance.
The company developed their temperature-sensitive battery tape for monitoring lithium-ion battery packs, and also larger areas. We find this particularly interesting, because the device is flexible, and can adapt to shapes around it.
We understand the tape could trigger an embedded controller or micro-controller unit, which could then provide a pre-programmed response. Such devices are common in automobile engine control systems, robots, and office machines, for example.
An Apparently Simple Mechanism to Mitigate Thermal Runaway
Interesting Engineering reviewed the temperature-sensitive battery tape, and made several interesting observations. They describe the product as a ‘thin, flexible strip of tape embedded with closely spaced temperature indicators’. Moreover. they confirm the tape adapts too irregular shapes of battery packs.
These features allow the tape to quickly detect emerging cell hot-spots. First, the closely-spaced temperature sensors on the tape increase their resistance when they detect temperature above a threshold.The temperature-sensitive battery tape then signals an electronic circuit that triggers a response, for example like switching off a power supply.
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