Battery Design Review, Quality & Safety Assessments

High Capacity Battery on Conveyor. Lithium-ion Cells for High-voltage Electric Vehicle Batteries Manufacturing Process. Battery Cells for Automotive Industry on Production Line.

Industry Analysis

Lessons from Asia for North American Battery Manufacturers

How does Exponent's unique multidisciplinary approach provide breakthrough insights for battery design, performance, quality, and safety challenges?

Life-saving medical interventions. Net-zero emissions targets. Energy-efficient communities. Interconnected, AI-powered devices. Across an array of products and industries, batteries underpin the innovations of the future. To make these goals a reality, our clients face rigorous performance, operational, and safety standards — and they need a trusted partner who understands today's challenges as well as tomorrow's.

At Exponent, we support our clients from ideation to post-market surveillance through battery design review, battery quality assessment, and battery safety assessments. We understand the scope and intent of battery standards across industries, and we have built our reputation on leveraging cross-industry knowledge to support boundary-pushing startups and established brands alike. Our experience enables us to identify issues and help clients formulate solutions with speed as we push performance beyond standardized tests to help ensure battery function as part of a complete, integrated product.

Our battery assessments include:

Design Review Assessment: Independent review of whether elements of a battery's design or any surrounding elements are likely to impact its safety or function, supported by choices in corrective action/risk mitigation.
Quality Assessment: Analysis of the quality and reliability of the battery given specific conditions and design factors, such as evaluation of how the operational environment could impact risk in an outdoor energy storage facility or a marine product where the battery may be encased in potting materials.
Safety Assessment: Investigation into battery failure modes and identification of engineering solutions directed at bespoke performance targets, whether the goal is to achieve graceful end-of-life conditions or confirm the reliability of a medical device.

Insight-driven analysis

The battery product journey is fraught with challenges, including precision performance, operation, and safety expectations. Companies are forced to focus on passing standardized tests, some of which may not fully reflect risks in design, reliability, foreseeable use, and environmental factors during the product lifetime.

With more than 50 years of failure analysis, Exponent applies understanding of failure sequences and potential propagation, allowing us to offer clients valuable insights into the possible consequences of various component or system failures and the product journey in different contexts. We help ensure that each phase of a battery-enabled product design process lays the groundwork for the next — and nothing falls through the cracks of individual requirements.

Examples of the specific considerations we bring to different industries include:

- Large-scale simulated safety assessments
- Vehicle wiring and circuit analysis
- Internal battery design evaluation
- Evaluation of batteries and systems based on our knowledge of safety standards by global region and their evolving implications for manufacturers
- Vehicle-scale thermal testing
- Vehicle use, abuse, and crash testing
- Mixed methods user experience research
- Autonomous vehicle obstacle course performance testing
- Comprehensive use/abuse tolerance analysis
- Performance-oriented design review for devices requiring high durability (e.g., toys, phones, notebook computers, and outdoor electronics)
- Protection circuit module monitoring and evaluation for safety considerations
- Accelerated lifetime analyses to evaluate performance, reliability, and propensity for failure
- Technology assessments of innovative cell chemistries and designs
- Thermal and heat transfer assessments of product performance and how that can affect the user
- Battery failure containment assessment
- Design failure modes and effects analyses (DFMEA) at any or all stages of the product lifecycle
- Assistance with battery selection and system requirements
- Implantable battery risk assessment
- Ethylene oxide sterilization testing and risk analysis
- FDA pre-market approval and pre-market notification (510(k)) testing
- Wireless charging, unintended charging, and cross-talk evaluations
- Secure failure mode engineering
- Contaminant assessment
- Accelerated testing to assess longevity and variability
- Battery system and software verification/validation
- Evaluation of product response to mechanical abuse, vibration, and shock during transportation
- Failure and root-cause analysis, and corrective and preventative actions (CAPA) analysis
- Battery storage installation standards interpretation and implementation at grid scale
- Engage key stakeholders, such as fire professionals, state and local citing boards, and regulatory agencies
- Performance risk assessments toward bankability, warranties, etc.
- Environmental and fire risk assessments for installation design and placement
- Battery storage site evaluations, including:
- Fire suppression and containment assessment
- Wildfire risk evaluation
- Assistance with grid-scale energy storage assessment plans to address newly issued or recently changed battery safety standards
- Evaluation of robustness of interaction with solar and other inverter inputs