Manufacturers

We proudly announced today that the new LG flagship smartphone, the LG V30, includes Qnovo’s adaptive charging technology. The V30 uses Qnovo’s QNI solution, our most sophisticated algorithms to manage its lithium-ion battery. In this post, we open our doors to give our readers insight to our technology and QNI in particular.

As complex and exotic as the battery may seem, you, the consumer, care only about a handful of things.

First, will the battery last you a whole day of use, no marketing gimmicks?

Second, will it charge fast enough? You don’t need blink-of-an-eye-charging but you don’t want to wait long too.

Third, will it last you at least two years or more, given that you are paying a premium price?

And lastly, can you rely that it will not risk your safety and the safety of those around you?

These attributes collectively define your overall battery experience; not one of them, but all of them together.

To last you a full day, the battery must have plenty of charge capacity, i.e., a lot of mAh. This is equal to a range between 3,000 to 3,500 mAh for today’s crop of smartphones. Anything more than that will make the smartphone unwieldy or too thick. To fit a 3,000 mAh battery in the small physical space inside a smartphone means high energy density. Today’s state of the art is near 650 Wh/l operating at a maximum voltage of 4.4 V. That’s the first headache already. At this high voltage and high energy density, the battery is really not happy and needs a lot of caring. I mean a lot of caring!

Fast charging the battery amplifies all the concerns of high voltage and high energy density, and makes them a lot worse. And if you have to charge more than once a day, well, this battery will need even more caring.

High energy density, high voltage and fast charging together are the factors that make the battery fail before two years, and risk making your battery unsafe.

Therein lies the challenge. How do we care for the battery ? and why has this required level of care become so much more sophisticated than ever before ?

As the old adage goes, “You can’t fix what you can’t measure.”

This leads to an important and critical new concept for batteries: Measuring what is happening within the battery, all the time, in real time, and then deciding what to do. By “within” I mean the “chemistry” that is taking place inside the battery…the stuff that you don’t see. This is called, in engineering terms, closed-loop feedback. Engineers know it, study it, and use it in countless situations.

Qnovo’s software adapts to your smartphone a measurement technique widely used in battery laboratories. It is called electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (abbreviated as EIS). It helps our scientists understand what happens inside the battery without destroying it. Qnovo’s innovation is in implementing EIS in your smartphone so that it is always monitoring your battery’s internal chemical processes.

We announced earlier this year that the Qualcomm® Snapdragon 835 that powers the LG V30 includes hardware that accelerates Qnovo’s algorithms. Indeed, the additional hardware in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset extends the utility of EIS inside the smartphone. The hardware in this new chipset enables measurements and frequencies that were not available in older chipsets. Qnovo’s QNI software takes advantage of this new hardware to gain deeper insight into the battery, again all in real time.

Now we get to the second portion of closed loop: What to do after making a measurement. As it turns out, and we thank science for that, charging the battery is a powerful knob to alter and affect what happens inside the battery. Qnovo’s adaptive charging takes the information from the EIS measurement, and then adjusts the charging current to reduce and mitigate possible harmful reactions detected during previous measurements.

With QNI, this “closed loop” happens a lot faster than its sister software product, QNS. As a result, it is able to detect more potential problems and react appropriately. Throughout a single charge, QNS makes approximately 200 measurements on the battery, whereas QNI makes close to 20,000 measurements.

Over the past years, we have collected a gigantic database of measurements on batteries from the vast majority of battery manufacturers. We have tested large quantities of batteries under diverse and extreme conditions. This knowledge allows Qnovo to train our algorithms to make them more efficient and more accurate especially as battery materials continue to evolve.

The skeptic might ask, “Great, but how does it help me, the end user?”

The most important benefit that the user derives is the health of the battery. You get a healthy battery AND more capacity AND fast charging…in other words, the consumer gets a great battery experience encompassing the attributes mentioned at the beginning of this post.

You, the consumer, do not have to worry whether your usage might hurt the battery. You don’t have to worry about fast charging because it might damage the battery. You don’t have to worry about charging to less than full because it helps the battery’s longevity. None of these should be your concerns and none should keep you thinking about the battery. Qnovo’s adaptive charging takes care of these battery issues in the background, and gives you a healthy battery with the best user experience.

So, if you are in the market for a new smartphone, do consider an LG V30 and do enjoy its battery experience.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away

smartphones used primitive energy sources called batteries 

that users could easily replace.

Then came the Apple iPhone and made it difficult to swap out the battery.

Batteries failed too often and even caught fire. Users got upset.

But the labels on the batteries stayed the same.

Whether you browse the web searching for a teardown of your favorite smartphone, or are sufficiently skilled to take a smartphone apart, you will always find a battery, a lithium-ion battery, with a whole bunch of markings on it.  Some of them are obvious to decipher, such as the name of the manufacturer. Other label marks may be puzzling such as a dog safety mark — yes, dogs seem to occasionally savor batteries. Then there are cryptic numbers that can mean very little to the average reader. The purpose of today’s post is to shed some light on what one can glean from the label of a lithium-ion battery.

The left photograph above is for the battery used in the iPhone 7 while the right photograph is for the Samsung S8 battery. The iPhone 7 battery has fewer markings than its Samsung S8 counterpart. That is typical of Apple’s batteries. It clearly shows the Apple logo but it does not say who manufactured the cell. Rumors abound on who manufactures Apple’s batteries in Asia, but Apple does not disclose this information on their battery labels. By contrast, the Samsung label clearly states that Samsung SDI manufactured this particular cell in Korea, and assembled it with its electronics in its factory in Vietnam.

Battery labels also state some required product certification marks depending on where the smartphone is sold. Both of these cells carry the PSE mark required by the Japanese Electrical Appliance and Material Safety Law. The Samsung S8 cell also carries the European CE mark as well as the Korean KC certification mark indicating compliance with the European and Korean product safety requirements. The iPhone battery carries the UL recognized component mark for the US market (which looks like a cRUus logo). These marks usually indicate that the product conforms with certain guidelines established by a regulatory body or government, but they do not guarantee the safety of the battery. Safety remains the responsibility of the smartphone manufacturer.

Both iPhone 7 and Samsung S8 battery labels also state some important electrical characteristics, in particular the battery’s capacity and its voltage. Battery capacity is stated in two units: maximum charge capacity measured in milli-amp-hours (mAh), and maximum energy stored in the battery measured in Watt-hours (Wh). The first is a measure of electrical charge (how many ions the battery can hold). The latter measures the total amount of energy. If you recall your high-school physics, energy is electrical charge multiplied by voltage. That is the third figure that one can read on the battery label.

For the iPhone 7, the maximum charge capacity is 1,960 mAh. For the Samsung S8, it is a nominal 3,000 mAh. In terms of maximum energy stored, the iPhone 7’s figure is 7.45 Wh which pales in front of the S8’s value of 11.55 Wh. So when we say that the Samsung S8 has a bigger battery than the iPhone 7, we mean that its  capacity is larger, not that it is physically bigger.

Now we get to the tricky conversation regarding voltage. First, we notice that the iPhone 7 battery reads only one value, 3.8 V. The Samsung S8 batteries reads two values: (i) a nominal voltage of 3.85 V and (ii) a charge voltage of 4.4 V. What do they mean?

Let’s start with the easy one. The charge voltage is the maximum voltage that the battery can be used in charging the cell. The Samsung S8 cell is rated to a maximum of 4.4 V. It does not mean that the charging is at 4.4 V. It only means that it can go as high as 4.4 V. We know that Samsung derates the cell to 4.35 V instead of 4.4 V to mitigate concerns about safety.

The nominal voltage needs a lot more explaining.  For that, we will need to examine the next graph showing the battery’s voltage and its dependence on state of charge (the measure of how full it is).

When a typical lithium-ion battery is empty (at zero percent), the voltage across its two terminals is low, about 2.9 V. As the battery is charged, its voltage will rise to its maximum charge voltage.  The “average” voltage throughout this charging process is called “nominal voltage.” It turns out that if the maximum voltage is 4.4 V, the corresponding nominal voltage is 3.85 V. But if the maximum voltage is only 4.35 V, then the nominal voltage is 3.80 V. So it becomes easy to figure out that the iPhone 7 has a maximum voltage of 4.35 V even though it is not stated on its battery label.

You have now become an expert in reading battery labels. But whatever you do, always remember to stay safe and keep your battery away from metal objects.

We, that’s all of us on this planet, buy every year 1.6 billion smartphones. It works out to one new smartphone every year for every four living human beings on this planet. Cumulatively, we own and use 4 billion smartphones around the world. Every region of the world, rich or poor, is buying smartphones. Many developing nations in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia are growing their smartphone subscriptions at a fast rate. Ericsson reports that by 2021, there will be 6.3 billion smartphone subscriptions, that’s nearly every man, woman and child around the world. Impressive!

Of course, each and every one of these smartphones has a battery in it. Your first reaction is: “that’s a lot of batteries.” Yes, that is true. Sadly, many of these batteries go to landfills after they are exhausted. The easiest way to gauge the size of the market for batteries is to calculate the entire energy supplied by all of them. Of course, that is a large number. It is measured in billions of watt-hours, abbreviated as GWh. As a reference mark, the battery in a top of the line Tesla S is 100 kWh. One GWh = 1 million kWh = 10,000 Tesla S.

In 2016, the battery factories around the world manufactured about 50 GWh worth of batteries for consumer devices. That drives an industry and a market worth in excess of $10 billions annually. Forecasts indicate that the consumer market will use about 65 to 70 GWh worth of batteries in 2020. Our appetite for more batteries is insatiable and the numbers show it.

Now let’s look at batteries in electrified vehicles, including both hybrid plug-in cars and pure electric cars (xEVs). This is a relatively new market. The Tesla S first came in 2012. The Nissan Leaf came a little earlier in 2011. Many states in the US or countries around the world haven’t yet experienced or experimented with such vehicles. In 2016, all of these vehicles accounted for a mere 0.9% of all car sales. In total, they amounted to less than 1 m vehicles in 2016.

However, in battery lingo, these cars accounted for an increasingly large number of GWh. The year 2016 was the first year that the battery capacity used in xEVs equalled that of all consumer devices, about 50 GWh. By 2020, xEVs will account for ⅔ of all battery production in the world. No wonder Elon Musk and the major car makers pay a lot of attention to their supply chain, including building these Gigafactories.

History recalls how great the fall can be

While everybody’s sleeping, the boats put out to sea

Borne on the wings of time

It seemed the answers were so easy to find

Roger Hodgson, Supertramp, from Fool’s Overture, 1977

MWC 2017 is over. The crowds came and saw ideas and innovations. The media covered and reviewed. Awards were made. Yet a sense of public amnesia seemed to hover over the battery safety problems that the Samsung Note 7 brought to surface in 2016. Yes, Samsung shows the deep scars of these fateful days. Yes, there is a real fear among the device manufacturers. And yet, the fear and concerns are also accompanied with a sense of paralysis, a sense of a rudderless ship when it comes to safety, and a sense of wishful thinking that the Note 7 fires were an aberration in time that the industry will put behind it.

I will spend today’s post to discuss how Samsung’s SDI, the primary battery supplier of the Samsung Note 7, is trying to lead its way through the choppy waters of the battery industry. Jun Young-Hyun, an executive who ran Samsung’s memory business, became in late February of this year SDI’s newest CEO, the company’s third in only five years. The information here is specific to Samsung SDI but the intent is to provide an insight into how the incumbents are redefining themselves in the presence of aggressive competition from Chinese battery suppliers.

A Goldman Sachs’ report charts the decline in operating margin for SDI’s lithium-ion battery product lines. Driven primarily by rising competition and decreasing productivity in their cylindrical and polymer batteries, the operating margin dropped by nearly half over the last ten years with little hope of recovery. Samsung SDI’s revenues, like many of the incumbents, came primarily from consumer devices including laptops, tablets and smartphones, totaling nearly $2.5 billion in 2016. But these revenues have been flat and are forecasted to stagnate despite rising unit volumes, reflecting the aggressive pricing competition from China.

Panasonic, through its successful relationship with Tesla, was the first to demonstrate that it can shift its revenue base from consumer batteries to automotive batteries. SDI and LG Chem seek to replicate the story.

SDI’s growing revenues in the past years in both xEV (encompassing both electrical vehicles and plug-in hybrids) as well as energy storage systems (ESS) reflect that strategy. Samsung SDI forecasts revenues from xEV to exceed $1.5 billion in 2018. The company reports that their ESS line is near breakeven, but that their xEV product line will lose nearly $200 million in 2017.

As LG Chem and SDI increasingly focus their attention on growing their share in xEV and ESS batteries, their Chinese competitors are busy winning market share in consumer devices, and more specifically, in smartphones. Samsung SDI, LG Chem, Panasonic and Sony Energy constituted the vast majority of battery units shipped into consumer devices. In 2016, China-based ATL garnered nearly a third of that market and has become a major supplier to several device OEMs including Samsung Electronics, the maker of the Samsung Galaxy smartphones. Such a scenario was unthinkable only a few years back. Samsung SDI was in effect a sole supplier to Samsung Electronics.

These shifting tectonics in the supply chain carry severe implications to the device OEMs. On the positive scale, more competition means savings to them. But in the process, these device OEMs are losing what once was a comfortable relationship with their battery sister companies. Samsung Electronics’ relationship with Samsung SDI allowed it to influence its technology and product roadmap. Samsung SDI provided its sister company with exceptional support. The same can be said of LG and its relationship with LG Chem, and Sony’s relationship with Sony Energy. Many pillars of this comfort zone will at least change if not vanish, and that will only cause the device OEMs a lot more anxiety about their battery supply chain. The poor quality and safety record of Chinese battery suppliers is very real. The safety problems of the Note 7 will only amplify these anxieties, even if not publicly displayed.

“History recalls how great the fall can be…It seemed the answers were so easy to find.”   Timeless words.

Samsung announced this week the results of their investigations regarding the Galaxy Note 7 fires. Samsung hired three independent test laboratories, Exponent, TUV Rheinland and UL to perform the analyses. The result was three full reports and presentations with technical details, mostly written by engineers for engineers. Vlad Savov at The Verge called the reports “humble and nerdy.” I can hear many in the audience screaming: “Translation, please!” I will try in this post to simplify and summarize the findings.

Of the three reports, the one written by Exponent is the one that offers the most useful pointers into what went wrong with the Note 7 batteries.  Here’s what it said, in simple terms.

First, Samsung Electronics (the maker of the Note 7) used batteries from two battery manufacturers: Manufacturer A is Samsung’s sister company, Samsung SDI; Manufacturer B is China-based Amperex Technology Limited, also known as ATL. In the sequence of events, the batteries made by Samsung SDI were the first to catch fires. Samsung Electronics decided to replace all SDI batteries with those made by ATL, but these too caught fire. Two different battery designs made by two different manufacturers, both catching fires..ouch! If you are a gambler, this is equivalent to winning the jackpot! But as we will see next, the published reports pointed instead to sloppy designs and poor manufacturing.

Let’s start with the Samsung SDI cells and what went wrong with them. I have shared in past posts the basic structure of a lithium-ion battery. It is made of alternating layers of conducting electrodes separated by an insulating layer called the separator. The #1 edict of battery safety is that the two electrodes, the anode and cathode, cannot touch. If they do, they form an electric short and cause a fire. It is common practice among battery experts that the root cause of most battery fires is an electric short. So what caused the electric short in the batteries from Samsung SDI?

The Samsung reports (as well as our own internal investigations) show that there was sufficient force on the edge of the battery during the manufacturing process that damaged the battery, effectively damaging the insulating separator or the graphite anode. When the separator gets damaged, it can no longer hold the anode and cathode physically apart; the two electrodes touch resulting in an electric short.

The second failure mode is more subtle but equally deadly. If you recall from previous posts, I have spoken about the need of a “balance” between the anode and cathode to prevent the formation of metallic lithium, also known as lithium plating. The presence of physical damage in the graphite layer breaks this balance creating the seeds for lithium metal. With use, lithium metal dendrites begin to form and ultimately grow to form a direct electric short inside the battery. The Exponent report illustrates this effect well in the following diagram. In other words, lithium plating is a dangerous culprit in the Note 7 fires.

I cannot over-emphasize the dangers of lithium metal plating! It is a lurking hazard that leads to unexpected fires. It is a risk that develops without visible manifestation. No amount of X-Ray inspection at the manufacturing site will detect the presence of lithium metal plating. And when these dendrites grow slowly in time, your battery will catch fire. In this particular case, the physical damage to the battery edge was the catalyst that led to lithium metal plating. But as I have mentioned repeatedly, many other reasons including aggressive battery designs can lead to lithium metal plating.

Now let’s talk about what went wrong with the ATL cells. The batteries made by ATL did not suffer from physical damage. Instead, the reports point to defects during the welding process of the electrical tabs (where one makes a connection to the battery). As the battery swelled and contracted during charging/discharging, these weld defects came apart and caused an electric short. In other words, this was pure and simple sloppy manufacturing by ATL in their rush to manufacture millions of batteries for Samsung.

Is there any hidden good news here or is it all bad news? The good news is that Samsung came clean. The Exponent report is credible and matches our own internal findings on the SDI battery. The good news is that the manufacturing defects during welding of the ATL batteries are relatively easy to address. I am reasonably certain that ATL and Samsung have now implemented proper procedures to eliminate welding defects. I am also reasonably certain that Samsung and SDI have implemented procedures to minimize physical damage to the battery edges.

But the bad news is that none of the new procedures address the elephant in the room: Lithium metal plating! We applaud all the additional inspection steps that Samsung is implementing, but the sad reality is that none of them will detect or prevent the formation of lithium metal plating. As I have observed in several prior posts, lithium metal plating can occur for many different reasons. Eliminating physical damage during manufacturing is good but is not sufficient and is not addressing a root cause of safety failures. Be prepared to see more battery fires in the industry!