(Pulsenics: Toronto) -- Pulsenics, a Toronto-based technology company, has announced AccelaGrade, a new quality control solution for lithium-ion battery remanufacturers. AccelaGrade represents a step-change advance in battery cell diagnostics that will help remanufacturers scale.

What is remanufacturing?

“Remanufacturing” battery packs means disassembling, testing, and refurbishing used lithium-ion batteries to keep them safely operating longer. Remanufactured packs can return to their original vehicle or be repurposed for stationary storage. A thriving remanufacturing sector will reduce costs for battery manufacturers and fleet operators while keeping batteries out of landfills.

Battery packs can contain dozens, hundreds, or thousands of lithium-ion cells, all of which must be individually tested and qualified during remanufacturing. Qualification typically takes the form of a letter grade: “A” cells can be reused, “B” cells are diverted to less demanding use cases, and “C” cells are discarded. These letter grades generally reflect a state of health, which itself describes how much capacity a battery has retained.

“Pulsenics designed AccelaGrade to help remanufacturers scale,” says COO Mariam Awara. “We’ve got a tremendous societal opportunity to keep batteries in the field for as long as possible. Extending the service lifetime of batteries is good business, and it’s the right thing to do.”

How does AccelaGrade change the remanufacturing business?

Remanufacturing has been slow to gain commercial traction due to a single bottleneck: quality control. It’s impractical to individually test every cell in a battery pack with existing technology. Now, remanufacturers must choose between grading regimes that are thorough but time-consuming, or tests that are fast but incomplete. AccelaGrade unblocks the remanufacturing vertical with quality control that’s fast, efficient, and comprehensive.

AccelaGrade uses multiple scanning technologies in tandem to create a rapid and sophisticated readout. It combines partial-discharge cycling, temperature measurements, and rapid electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) to create a rich dataset. Those data are used to make state-of-health evaluations that display onscreen as letter grades. This digital-first approach enables Pulsenics partners to instantly configure their grading criteria to their unique needs.

Many remanufacturers rely on single-purpose cyclers, which can require up to eight hours to deliver an SoH readout. AccelaGrade produces an equally accurate letter grade, based on integrated datasets, in 25 minutes or less—a 19x improvement.

“If we’re going to bring remanufacturing to scale, we’ve simply got to solve quality control,” says CEO Essam Elsahwi. “Our customers can do amazing things extending battery lifetime if they can just get the data they need at the speed their business requires. AccelaGrade will catalyze new growth in the remanufacturing vertical.”