R&D centre gets SiC-based battery testing technology

This world class R&D centre, WMG, at the University of Warwick, Energy Innovation Centre, is one of Europe’s largest.

Mark Amor-Segan, Principal Engineer at WMG said “The Digatron battery cycling equipment we're getting for the new battery Lab is the state of the art. It will also be one of the biggest installations in the Energy Innovation Centre here at Warwick. The equipment is being used for the testing and characterisation of energy storage technologies, from basic electrical characterisation through to extended ageing testing and thermal characterisation.”

The Digatron system offers significant benefits over previous generations including: fully regenerative operation with intelligent energy management, returning unwanted energy to the grid rather than losing it as waste heat so helping to reduce building infrastructure costs; exceptionally high channel and power density (small footprint, lots of high current channels or circuits in a single rack); and is fully web-enabled to help improve productivity and usability.

WMG is testing a wide variety of electrochemical energy storage systems including lithium-ion, sodium-ion, lithium-sulphur cells and super-capacitor technologies.

Through improved testing and characterisation techniques the teams at WMG expect to obtain a much more detailed and accurate understanding of how these energy storage systems work, in turn leading to better and more accurate models for electrical, thermal, mechanical performance and ageing prediction of batteries.

This will help optimise and improve the design of battery systems, reduce product and warranty costs through enhanced safety.

Kevin Campbell, CEO of Digatron Power Electronics declared: “Digatron is very pleased to contribute in this way to the future of the battery industry and energy-related applications at the prestigious WMG battery research centre. Their work will provide significant advancements for all those industries intending to rely more heavily on battery power in the future and in particular for the automobile industry.”