Joule

Zhou, Shangwei, Du, Wenjia, Mager, Bastian, Shearing, Paul R., Miller, Thomas S., Jervis, Rhodri, 2025/09/17 doi: 10.1016/j.joule.2025.102099

The rapid growth of battery technologies is central to achieving a net-zero society, but it comes with a major bottleneck: reliable and high-throughput diagnostics to ensure cell consistency across production and reuse cycles. Existing tools like electrochemical impedance spectroscopy offer detailed insights into battery health but are too time-consuming, expensive and operationally complex for widespread deployment, especially at giga-factory scale or in second-life applications. This study introduces a transformative solution: the multi-channel and multi-frequency electrical excitation response (MMER) technique. MMER enables full-module screening of batteries in just 1 s, independent of cell count, with diagnostic accuracy comparable to EIS, but with over 99% reduction in time. It eliminates the need for time-to-frequency domain conversion and instead relies on direct voltage response comparisons using a shared binary excitation signal.
This capability represents a major improvement over conventional methods, unlocking real-time, non-invasive, and scalable battery diagnostics that are suitable not only for manufacturing quality control but also for onboard safety screening, second-life triaging, and operando monitoring. MMER addresses long-standing challenges in the field, such as identifying cell imbalance in serial configurations and diagnosing batteries during dynamic usage without requiring steady-state conditions. Its using field programmable gate array (FPGA) compatibility and hardware simplicity make it particularly attractive for industrial adoption. Continued development of MMER can accelerate the safe deployment and circular use of batteries and other electrochemical systems.