The Latest on Codes and Standards and Battcon 2023 Preview

DC Power Hour

In this episode, the Battery Blarney Duo of Alan and George and are joined by their longtime friend and colleague at times, Dan Lambert. These gentlemen definitely have their finger on the pulse of the industry and can shed some light on the really interesting topic of codes and standards.

Episode Highlights

04:40 – Not only with the national Electrical code NFPA 70, but also with the fire codes and UL and the IEEE standards. We've got so many change that's going on. It's sometime really hard to keep up with. You think just about UL alone, they've had revisions in the last six months of UL 94, UL 1778, 1973, 9540 has been revised and the 95 48 test procedure has been revised.

14:41 – And the, the crux of it is, is that what they do is they take a battery and they subject it to a, a variety of test methods, overcharge over discharge, overheating it short circuit a nail penetration test where that's something that's conceivable. And all of these tests are designed to see what it takes to set that battery on fire, if in fact it will will burn.

42:49 – So, and we know that monitoring and management within lithium battery is critical from a safety point of view to make sure that it doesn't either overcharge or over discharge, and to identify potential thermal runaway conditions. We don't have the same problem with the newer technologies, do we, Dan? What are we looking at in the way of monitoring and controls within these new technologies?

52:53 – And then when you have to build a system out of those components into something that's commercially viable, and you have generally contract manufacturing doing the assembly and such as that with those systems, you've introduced several layers of potential miscommunication, let's just put it that way, and that miscommunication can be a real problem for the end user.