What Does IR Testing Mean in Battery Sorting Machines?

When used in battery sorting machines, IR testing (infrared testing) is a term used to refer to measuring generally the battery’s temperature during sorting. It is one of the methods employed to ensure that batteries work correctly and meet quality and performance standards. Other testing methods (from electric and hybrid vehicles to consumer electronics) include resistance, ranging, electronic load, amp hour capacity and others.
IR tests monitored during sorting are designed to help classify batteries in a battery sorting machine to identify those that obviously do not pass the test and for others whose tests suggest that they don’t meet a required standard.For instance, if a battery shows higher temperature readings than the others, it might indicate that the cell is faulty or experiencing thermal runaway.
The IR testing is fast and non-invasive, and as such is ideal for use in a fast moving sorting operation in a sorting machine. By integrating this technology into their sorting machines, manufacturers of batteries can only allow batteries of high performance and safe batteries through the sorting process.
Why Is Important for Battery sorting Machines.
Safety: Batteries in particular, Lithium-Ion cells are likely to fail and as a result of that they are likely to catch fire. With IR batch testing it is far less likely that an internal defect will open itself up for all to see.
Quality Control: Ongoing temperature of batteries means only out of spec failures are used in product.
Efficiency: In that it is not longer necessary to batch test manually and thus speed up the sorting machine significantly.
Cost: By allowing faulty or bad batteries through the machine as is currently done and gathering from that only to replace cast offs faulty batteries, huge amounts of money is wasted and only Paltry profits are gained.
Applications for Batch Testing
Particularly applicable for use in electric vehicles. In that battery performance is critical for the maximum range that would be allowable for each car and to kill two birds with one stone being as voltaged as well, this method is ideal.
As Car batteries are not the only product use for batteries. Consumer Electronics, applications like the home-energy Storage Systems becoming popular amongst users for cash flow mitigation, is that battery performance as well as safety is paramount.
Summary
As this is a new technique, and never used before as part of the operation in a battery sorting machine, IR batch testing of the batteries is stage one, taking place before even a batch of cells can be tested by the machines themselves take place.
Assuming that the IR tester is part of the operation of a commercially available battery sorting machine produced by a reputable manufacturer, manufacturers can rest assured that they will not only start to make safer batteries but also gain more reliable batteries pricing and markets.