You’ve heard of rage rooms—places where you pay good money to smash things to bits while experiencing total cathartic bliss? Well, the engineers at Sandia National Laboratories have their own rage room testing lithium-ion batteries, most commonly found in electric cars, computers and aircrafts.
Check out this video where they impact-test battery cells beyond their limits while the cameras record the carnage. As the batteries suffer, researchers capture data on speed, force, temperature and voltage. They most recently created an inside tower to up the abuse by dropping 500 pounds on the batteries.
“This becomes our ninth way of killing a battery,” said Sandia battery-abuse testing engineer Chris Grosso. “It hits with so much force that so far, we are just chopping the battery in half.” Why so much suffering? Testing is necessary as the industrial world constantly pushes for more battery storage and power. The more data available, the better developers can design the next generation of energy storage devices for better performance and safety.
Talk about assault and battery.