Battery Abuse Testing

Design better products and keep end users safe. Get the clear data you need to understand how batteries react to the most extreme circumstances with Element’s exhaustive battery abuse testing.

The real world can subject batteries to an incredible range of damaging conditions, and the potential danger posed by malfunctioning batteries, especially lithium-ion batteries, is now well-known to the public. Abuse testing applies a range of adverse conditions to battery cells and packs in a laboratory to collect data on how they will react to similar conditions while in use. Abuse testing goes far beyond ordinary usage scenarios to assess a battery’s performance and safety.

Battery abuse testing methods

Abuse testing typically falls into four categories, but tests can be combined to mimic specific conditions and test methods or protocols can be customized to meet customer needs:

Environmental stress, including very high or very low temperature, humidity, high altitude or vacuum, overpressure, immersion, thermal shock, hot oven, or accelerated rate calorimetry.

Mechanical stress, including vibration, mechanical shock, crushing, nail penetration, impact, free fall, bend testing, and end crushing.

Electrical stress, including over-voltage, under-voltage, over-current during charge, short circuit during discharge, and forced discharge; and

Intentional thermal runaway testing

Improve design through battery abuse testing

Battery abuse testing provides crucial information about both the battery’s performance and its safety. Damaged batteries can cause safety risks that manufacturers must preempt and mitigate before the battery enters the market, but devices that continue to perform well in extreme environments are also more attractive to customers. With a range of abuse testing options that cover all major performance and safety variables, Element laboratories are your full-service battery testing solution.

The Element advantage

Save time and money by trusting Element to be your single-source provider of fully comprehensive battery testing services. Combined, our purpose-built facilities have the greatest battery testing capacity in North America, and our experts have the knowledge and experience to test batteries across all industries and for virtually all applications.

Contact Element today to find out how we can help you deliver safer, better-performing batteries to market.