Hot on the heels of a major EV battery fire in South Korea, battery maker LG Energy Solution said it is entering the battery safety diagnostics software business. It said it has developed safety diagnostics software based on empirical data from disassembling and analysing more than 130,000 battery cells and 1,000 battery modules.
BEST asked if the timing of its move is linked to the fire earlier this month in Incheon. LGES said the EV fire did not involve one of its batteries and so declined to comment on whether its system would have made a difference.
It has applied safety diagnostics software to more than 100,000 EVs and generated a fault detection accuracy rate of over 90%, it claimed.
The diagnostics analyses defects, including voltage drop during charging, battery tab failure, micro internal short circuit, abnormal degradation, abnormal discharge, deviation in specific cell capacity and excessive lithium precipitation.
LGES claimed most battery diagnostics software solutions are based on technologies developed by predicting virtual conditions rather than real environments, meaning low accuracy.
Its software will be mounted on battery management systems, with functions that pre-emptively diagnose battery abnormalities such as thermal incidents. Nine global automakers are already testing the software, it said.
Hyuksung Chung, vice president of business development at LGES, said: “Although automakers are starting to shift their attention to safety diagnosis technology, it takes time and resources to develop and apply reliable software.”
The company said the software can predict a battery’s future capacity and degradation based on data gathered on various information such as driving patterns.
It upgrades algorithms via AI computing technology, which it claimed reduces battery degradation diagnosis to the 1% range.
