Preliminary Design of a Flexible Test Station for Second-Life Battery Development

Second-life batteries are storage systems composed of many second-hand lithium cells picked up from batteries that reached the end-of-life in high power and energy applications, such as electric vehicles. Indeed, at least 80% of the available capacity is still available and can be reused in other applications that require lower energy and power densities, such as in stationary energy storage systems. Although this concept can produce environmental and economic improvements, it has not penetrated the market yet because many issues must be solved before the massive introduction of second life batteries. This work presents the preliminary design of a flexible test station for second-life battery modules. This station aims at providing a tool to accelerate the investigation on the second-life battery issues. The station is highly flexible because is allocated in a 19-inch rack architecture that allows seamless board swap and replacement. Indeed, the battery cells and the electronic control boards can easily and quickly be replaced by extracting the specific rack drawers and inserting new ones with different features.