South 8 achieves faster development cycles and higher pilot production yields with Voltaiq.
South 8 used Voltaiq to transform how they derive insight from battery process development and testing, driving faster progress and ensuring consistent, quality products.
Easy access to test results in real time.
Before Voltaiq, it was difficult for South 8 engineers to collect, clean, access, and share battery test data. With Voltaiq, data is uploaded in real time and cleaned in a common format, ready to use at any time by anyone on the team. Users can build essential plots of test results in seconds, whereas before it took hours or days.
“My team can make a workspace. They can dump in the kinds of information we're interested in, it automatically updates, and then we can all see it in real time," explains Jungwoo. “And it's not so much about we're stuck in Excel, oh, copy paste that here, readjust that here… we can see it. We can make a choice.”
Faster, deeper analysis capabilities.
Hours previously spent manually cleaning data and manually plotting in Excel are now spent making quick, data-led decisions that move their programs forward faster. Engineers have a more intimate relationship with the data, and can derive deeper insights, faster than before.
“When one of my team members started integrating a lot of dQ/dV plots... you could spend probably hours just playing with your own manual filters to try to clean up that data, let alone getting multiple data sets in a beautiful gradient," notes Jungwoo. “You can spend more time focused on what the data is telling you."
Pinpointing and resolving upstream process and material issues.
As South 8 scaled to pilot production, Voltaiq became essential for correlating battery issues to the upstream processes and materials that caused them. Engineers can catch anomalies in real time, find the root cause, and correct issues in hours compared to days or weeks.
“We've set up a pilot line to demonstrate a lot of these concepts. And through that, what we also learn is a lot of the challenges that people have when they're making a lot of changes on their line and when they're trying to chase down performance metrics. And so, with Voltaiq, we've been able to integrate metadata into our system so that when we do have anomalous electrochemical signals, we're then able to track down key features of that production process."
About South 8 Technologies
South 8 Technologies, Inc. develops, manufactures and licenses LiGas®, the liquefied gas electrolyte for advanced lithium-ion batteries that solves lithium-ion's "fire and ice™" problems. South 8's patented LiGas electrolyte reduces fire risk and operates across a wide temperature range, from -60 to 60 °C.
South 8's innovative technology, named to TIME's List of the Best Inventions of 2024, enables clean battery power to benefit more applications, environments, and people. LiGas is also compatible with common battery materials, increases energy, supports fast charging, and is cost effective for battery manufacturers. Headquartered in San Diego, South 8 has introduced its first in a family of LiGas battery cells, Arctic™ LiGas 18650, with new form factors and additional battery chemistries in development.
" The most precious resource is time. Those time savings to do root cause analysis and FA and then containment and deployment of solutions, faster time in terms of process development... it all comes down to yield target. Along with a cost target, right? It all goes hands in hand.”
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