Technology Overview
CellSage is an advanced battery and electrochemical analysis tool from Ridgetop Group, that assesses battery condition based on the specific chemistry, usage conditions, and the environment in which it operates, with benefits that include safety improvements, faster reaction times, greater diagnostic abilities, and methods to achieve a better understanding of incident precursors as well as repair and maintenance techniques for battery-based energy systems.
Batteries are often the weak link in power systems, and tools are needed to characterize these power systems in the field. Under license from the DOE’s Idaho National Lab (INL), Ridgetop Group has extended CellSage to offer customers advanced methods for determining long term performance of battery packs used in stationary power backup systems, and electric vehicles.
Key Features:
- Pre-defined library of common battery types, including Lithium Ion and NiCd.
- Enables design centering for extreme environmental “corners” of temperature, humidity, and radiation.
- Addresses diagnostic and prognostic evaluations of battery systems, including capacity fade
- Optimizes battery life by investigating thermal management, customized operating conditions and string anomalies
- Includes more than 10 environmental and operational parameters, including battery chemistry, temperature and thermal cycling are taken into account
- Powerful analysis covering conditions in 130 U.S. cities
Key Benefits:
- Advanced modeling framework reduces training time and allows researchers to rapidly employ CellSage to improve battery measurement capability.
- Ability to adjust battery designs to meet actual deployment conditions
- Easily add new or non-standard battery chemistries with an interactive user interface and model editor.
- Provides the capability for “what if” analyses with the intuitive graphical user interface.
CellSage: CellSage IVHM-related Runtime Licenses
CellSage can take into account more than 10 environmental and operational parameters, including battery chemistry, temperature and thermal cycling, as well as cell string topology. CellSage calculates more than 20 vital health metrics and aging effects, including state of charge (SOC), capacity loss, cell/battery conductance loss, and power fade. Originally developed by researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Ridgetop Group leverages the underlying CellSage technology to provide users with easy-to-understand metrics, indicators, and plots that show the battery’s capacity at any point in time.
Through a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI), CellSage users are presented a clear picture of how the battery is aging and an accurate projection of how long the battery will last for given conditions.
In addition to its application for monitoring batteries that are already in use, CellSage can simulate ‘what if’ scenarios to weigh the impact of operational and environmental parameters on battery performance and health, aiding in the selection for the most appropriate battery for a given mission.
Ridgetop Group is currently working with industry leaders to deploy an embedded version of CellSage that will interface with new and existing Integrated Vehicle Health Monitoring (IVHM) systems. An IVHM system is intended to provide the driver and maintenance personnel information on the state-of-health (SoH), and the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of the vehicle. Ideally, there can be a prognostic “signature” that precedes a failure in the system. This capability, in turn, allows more economical Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) practices to be supported. For an electric vehicle, this would include on-going monitoring of the battery pack, mitigating faults during the lifetime of the car, and guiding maintenance intervals based on actual degradation or wear-out mechanisms.
The potential is large as, in 2013 alone, the United States saw 96,000 plug-in electrical cars sold — representing slightly more than half a percent of the total market of 16.5 million vehicles, according to a recent Green Car Report.
CellSage Battery Modeling and Characterization Tool
Aimed at Academic and Industrial Researchers who are responsible for the development of battery power sources for diverse applications such as Electric Vehicles, Aircraft Auxiliary Power Units (APUs), Medical Electronics, and other crucial applications, the key focal points of CellSage include careful attention to thermal management. These key attributes — as well as the advantages of the CellSage Analysis product — can be seen Battery System Design Document.
CellSage Applications
Battery end-users in the vehicle, Grid ES, UAS and Aeronautical field will find incentive of this product through lower costs, reduced warranty cases and battery aging — resulting in reduced cost of replacement — and savings to battery pack costs via CellSage-aided design and lifetime analysis.
Product Brief
Related Webinars & Publications
- CellSage Webinar August 2020
- Novel Method for Evaluation and Prediction of Capacity Loss Metrics in Li-Ion Electrochemical Cells
Contact us for More Information
Click here to request a software evaluation trial via email, or have a Ridgetop Group representative reach you directly by filling in the below contact form.
Ridgetop is certified as category 1A under the Defense Microelectronics Activity (DMEA) as part of the Trusted Supplier Program. Ridgetop has history of designing analog and mixed signal ICs for demanding applications in space satellites that are subjected to extreme temperatures and radiation. Our designs have utilized bulk CMOS, CMOS-SOI, and SiGe at process geometries down to 28 nm channel lengths. Radiation hardness is also a concern, and Ridgetop has addressed those requirements as well. A recent Ridgetop design was delivered to ON Semiconductor for the U.S. Air Force STELLAR Star Tracker.
Under contract to NASA, Ridgetop designed an effective 3-axis wireless rotational sensor. The RotoSense™ sensor has been tested on fast-spinning pinion gears on helicopter gear boxes, and also rolling stock for railroad safety improvements.