The battery is going to be the central feature of many, if not most, of our vehicles in coming years. And yet work at the Millbrook Proving Grounds in Bedfordshire suggests that we're really only at the early stages of understanding some important aspects of battery pack performance. Jim Hooper, senior engineer in the component test laboratory at Millbrook, has been studying the impact of vibration on the kinds of battery packs that are being used in electric vehicles (EVs), and he believes there are gaps in knowledge and understanding, particularly about the long-term effects on performance of vibration and shock. More than that, Hooper and his Millbrook colleagues have discovered that the current standard tests and regulatory requirements in this area are a bit lacking. Some of the procedures that are currently used as norms for testing automotive batteries are apparently derived from sectors such as consumer electronics, where the battery size, shape, configuration and usage is likely to be very different from the kind of world that EV batteries inhabit.
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