The Synergy Between Battery Testing & Acculon Labs: Interview with Matt Volk & Andrew Huster

Full Transcript:

Introduction to Acculon Labs

Matt Volk

I’m Matt Volk, Director of Acculon Labs, Acculon’s premier battery test lab. And I’m here with Andrew Huster, Technical Program Manager and Head of Electrical Hardware and Software Development. Andrew leads our battery management system development. Andrew, could you explain to everyone what a battery management system is?

Introduction to Battery Management Systems

Andrew Huster

Yeah, a battery management system is basically an electronic control system that is designed to make sure that the battery is always kept within safe parameters, in addition to interfacing with the platform or whatever the battery is in, communicating with that. But its primary purpose, its main safety purpose, is to make sure that the battery is always kept within its voltage, current, and temperature limits.

What Makes Acculon’s BMS Unique?

Matt Volk 

And can you get into any details of what sets our battery management system apart from anyone else’s?

Andrew Huster 

So our battery management system is designed to be very modular.  It is voltage agnostic; we go down to 24 volts, and we can go and build systems up to 800 volts or even higher. And for any number of modules from one to 32, and given, you know, a series, and then we can also put multiple BMS together in like a rack mount system and have hundreds of modules. And our BMS is designed to flexibly handle that without us having to, you know, maintain separate software chains and hardware for all these different applications.

So, from a testing perspective, what are the sorts of tests that we do for battery management systems?

BMS Testing and Development

Matt Volk 

Primarily, a lot of characterization testing, capacity, trying to figure out the full range of what you can get out of a battery at varying temperatures, as well as a wide range of resistance tests. Seeing at different states of charge, what you can get out of a battery, and what resistance you may be facing, to help figure out both temperature and capabilities of that battery in the field. Once we get through that, we also need to do quite a bit of aging testing so that we can see over the lifetime worth of the battery, and so that we can work on programming our BMS to handle those changes over the lifetime of that battery.

BMS and Acculon Labs Synergy

Andrew Huster 

And then, where we’ve leveraged the testing lab’s expertise is the 15-plus years of cell testing. And we’re able to leverage that and the extensive testing of the cells that we use in our modules to have really well-defined and parameterized models in our battery management system for ourselves and therefore our modules and our PACs to be able to predict the behavior from a state of charge and temperature perspective, and basically better control and be more efficient in things like our state of charge estimation and our temperature estimation and making sure that we’re also protecting the battery appropriately based on all of the observations that we’ve made.

One of the things that’s really cool is that we do have the in-house lab. It means that when we’re working on our battery management system, hardware and software, we can just run to the lab or in fact, we have some of our BMS folks who just work in the lab full time so that they can be there with the test equipment and with the modules or whatever else so that we can basically iterate in real time and find and fix issues, test performance and things like that, as opposed to having to send stuff out to external test houses to run some of these, especially like high current, high voltage kinds of tests that we do. We’re able to do quite a lot of the testing in-house, and it has allowed us to iterate very quickly on our initial prototype designs and refine our algorithms and things like that.

Matt Volk 

It’ been a very cooperative effort between the testing side and the BMS side, where we’ve been able to kind of merge that effort together, utilizing those capabilities essentially at any time needed to develop them.

Andrew Huster 

We’ve also helped the lab sort of refine some of its data processing and capture technology as well, as we found that it helps us in our development, and also helps you in your lab.

Matt Volk 

There’s been a bit of a give-and-take between BMS development and lab development to aid each other in that

The Battery Show 2025 and Outro

Matt Volk 

That was a small amount of insight into Acculon’s battery management system development and testing. Andrew, we’re going to be at the battery show in the coming weeks. If anyone wants to talk to you, when will you be there?

Andrew Huster 

I’ll be at the battery show on Wednesday. We are at booth 3747. And yeah, I’ll be there on Wednesday. So anyone with questions specifically around our battery management system can plan to stop by then. We’ll have a rack mount system of our BMS sort of cutaway model for folks to look at and see the different hardware. And we can talk you through some of the software, algorithms, and features, and things like that. So yeah, looking forward to seeing folks on Wednesday, October 8th, at The Battery Show in Detroit.

Matt Volk 

I’ll be in the booth all week. So please stop by, and we look forward to seeing you!

Learn more about the Acculon booth at The Battery Show 2025 by visiting this page: Acculon x The Battery Show 2025