Taking the Measure

What features do you look for in a battery, and do you know which battery technologies to choose to get the features you want? The folks at Nexergy (which merged with ElectriTek AVT in January) wanted to know how their current and prospective customers might answer such questions, so they conducted a survey called “Mind of the Market 2008,” which they sent to design engineers and marketers.

John Costa, executive VP at Nexergy, visited our headquarters yesterday to discuss the survey results. Note that Nexergy provides batteries, chargers, and custom design services for military and aerospace, safety and security, appliances and tools, test-and-measurement, data-acquisition, and medical markets. It does not, however, focus on laptop batteries or batteries for high-volume consumer electronics, so specifiers of such batteries may have different priorities than those of Nexergy’s respondents.

The survey first posed the question, “What improvements in battery performance would be most critical to adding value to your end product?” Designers and marketers both chose runtime as the most important. Designers followed runtime with safety, cycle life, power, cost, size, and weight, in that order, while marketers followed runtime with power, cycle life, safety, weight, cost, and size.

Safety is on the mind of designers and end users, said Costa, but survey results show designers and marketers are unwilling to sacrifice runtime for improved safety. Designers are most willing to tolerate increased weight for improved safety; marketers would sacrifice size. As for cost and safety, designers, except for those in the medical field, were unwilling to pay more for redundant safety features.

Costa said that the “don’t know” answer was high in response to many survey questions. For example, when asked whether the lower energy density of lithium iron phosphate (LiFeP) chemistry was more than offset by LiFeP’s improved safety, higher rate capability, and longer cycle life, 49% of designers and 44% of marketers didn’t know, suggesting that an educational effort is in order.

A question about battery technologies also elicited many “don’t know” responses. 34% of designers and 40% of marketers don’t know what technologies they are considering for their next portable power solution.

Despite the seeming lack of knowledge in some areas, marketers and designers agree that battery packs are not commodity items and that they are important in developing a product that outperforms the competition.

If you want to improve your own battery IQ, you can visit the battery chemistry selector on Nexergy’s Website.

As for my battery IQ, here’s what I know about batteries (and my knowledge, such as it is, is limited to laptop and consumer-electronics batteries):  they run down too darn soon, they have lousy cycle lives, and they are too dang expensive. That's all I know. I leave the technical details to my colleague Margery Conner. Please visit her Powersource blog.