Sandia Labs Battery Abuse Testing Laboratory undergoing $4.2 million stimulus fund renovation

Sandia National Laboratories
July 12, 2011

Sandia’s world-renowned Battery Abuse Testing Laboratory is undergoing a major renovation so Sandia researchers can test larger batteries for electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.
The nation’s leading facility for battery testing was built in 1991, and has conducted thousands of critical scientific studies to evaluate the safety of batteries under every imaginable abuse scenario that a battery might face in the real world. Those studies included 12 years of testing for the FreedomCAR program and the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium.

The $4.2 million overhaul, paid for with federal stimulus funds, includes updating test bays, data acquisition systems and laboratory space, and hiring additional staff members to meet the growing demand for Sandia’s battery safety expertise.

“This will bring our capabilities up to the point where we can test larger batteries that are going to be relevant to the electric vehicle market, and move up to batteries that will be used in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles,” said Chris Orendorff, team lead for the Battery Abuse Testing Lab. “We’ll have the capability to test batteries in the 5- to 15-kilowatt-hour range, which we’ve never done before. This scale of testing is critical to the deployment of electric vehicles that are needed to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.”
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