Micro Power Announces Upgrades to its Lithium Battery Pack
Micro Power Electronics, Inc. announced several upgrades to SecuraPack,™ its custom lithium battery pack designed to optimize battery system reliability and product safety. The SecuraPack brand offers OEM customers a premium solution with a customized, high-performance — and most importantly, safe — battery system that is resistant to dangerous malfunctions. Micro Power intends to raise the safety standard in battery system reliability with SecuraPack to virtually eliminate the risk of unwanted electrochemical reactions and electrical failures. Specific upgrades include authentication, redundant protection circuits and Li-ion cells designed with enhanced safety.
With the recent increase in the catastrophic failure of battery packs associated with improper charging of counterfeit rechargeable batteries, aftermarket batteries have resulted in injuries and tarnished brand names. The implementation of a challenge/response authentication system that prevents the use of an invalid battery pack can remedy these problems. SecuraPack implements authentication with a small microcontroller embedded in the battery pack that communicates with the processor resident in the host device. Authentication will protect against not only the accidental use of an inappropriate battery pack, but also against intentional copying of battery packs by making the reverse engineering of the system prohibitively expensive.
In addition, SecuraPack's enhanced safety features include protection circuitry that will disable the battery pack in the event of temperatures or currents that are out of spec. However, some batteries are so crucial to a device that only dangerous events, such as thermal runaway or a short circuit, should disable the battery pack. SecuraPack's patent-pending redundant protection circuit design has two protection circuits, and if one fails due to a non-safety cause, the parallel circuit can continue to operate. The battery pack is disabled only when both circuits experience a common failure event, threatening safety.
Li-ion batteries offer the best energy density of any rechargeable battery chemistry, but they are dependent on a polymer separator to inhibit internal shorting of the anode and cathode. Now cells are available with separators that have a heat-resistant layer, which prevents hole expansion, in the event of a puncture. In addition, new solid solution cathode materials raise the temperature at which thermal runaway occurs. Micro Power Electronics has qualified these cells to its stringent standards and has designed several battery packs incorporating them.
