Build compliance in from day one: battery design considerations for mobile environments with TÜV SÜD.

Born Compliant: Battery Design Considerations in a Mobile Environment (Hybrid)

A workshop for technology companies, hosted at Hub350 Ottawa, with a virtual attendance option.

Lithium-ion batteries are always “on”. Once there is an electrical path, the chemical energy in a cell can deliver current and, under abuse, release hazards such as fire, venting, rupture, and thermal runaway. A cell can’t switch itself off, so the battery system around it, and especially the battery management system (BMS), has to protect it. Understanding what the cell covers and what is left for the battery to cover helps you design a safer product and avoid surprises during certification. This session explains how battery safety standards treat the BMS and how to build compliance into your design.

Who should attend:
Companies that design, integrate, or specify battery packs and battery-powered products, including electric vehicles, light electric vehicles, energy storage, industrial equipment, and consumer devices. This is a strong fit for hardware, electronics, and firmware developers, product and engineering teams, and founders preparing for safety certification.

What you’ll take away:

– How a battery pack can protect its cells against the key cell weaknesses of overcharge, over-discharge, and internal short circuit, and where cell-level protection ends and battery-level protection must begin
– What a BMS does: monitoring, balancing, current limiting, thermal management, and disconnecting the pack to avoid hazardous conditions
– How cells behave in series and parallel strings, why misbehaving or out-of-balance cells create risk, and what balancing needs to address
– The role and limits of thermal management, including why cooling cannot stop a first-cell thermal runaway but may help limit passive propagation
– Which standards apply to your product (UL 1973, UL 2580, UL 2271, IEC 62619, CSA/ANSI C22.2 No. 340:23) and which functional safety standards support them (ISO 13849, UL 60730-1 Annex H, ISO 12100)
– The basics of functional safety, including how risk is defined and how common safety requirements for overvoltage, undervoltage, over-temperature, and overcurrent are derived for a BMS
– How single-channel, single-channel tested, and redundant BMS architectures compare, with a worked overvoltage detection example
– Why electromagnetic immunity testing is required when electronic or software controls are relied upon for safety
– By the end, you should have a clearer picture of how to interpret and account for safety standards requirements, and how that understanding can shorten your time to certification.

About TÜV SÜD:
TÜV SÜD is an independent, impartial testing, inspection, and certification organization with roots dating to 1866. It has around 28,000 employees at more than 1,000 locations worldwide. Its Ottawa laboratory offers third-party compliance testing for telecommunications, defence (CGP certified), medical devices, and automotive and transportation, including EMC/EMI, environmental, shock and vibration, radio frequency, and product safety testing.