About Us
Mission:
Rethinking battery safety and reliability to ensure the growth of the $200 billion battery industry
Who We Are:
We are a deep technology battery health testing and diagnostic company. We are led by scientists, engineers and energy professionals working alongside leading battery researchers at US DOE national laboratory.
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Beyond battery health testing and measurement, our team has extensive experience in renewable energy, investing, software, hardware and policy working with private sector, regulators, and government industries in the US and international.
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Novus Sentry is a INNOVYZ USA portfolio company, an investment and management company focused on identifying technologies that can be applied to the future of manufacturing and the use of advanced materials, to solve the massive problems facing mankind.
Industries We Serve
As our economy increasingly transitions to variable energy sources, batteries will be ubiquitous. Some of the industries we serve include:
Electric Mobility
Energy Storage Systems
Aviation and Aerospace
Consumer Appliances
Marine and Maritime
Applications​​​
Before Use
Quality Control: Manufacturing and Assembly
During Use
Health Monitoring: Performance and Reliability
After Use
Second Life: Reuse and Recycling
What is battery health and failure risks?
Novus Sentry focuses on the rapid testing, detection and prediction of faults that can lead to high safety risk such as catastrophic failures and thermal runaway. Through a proprietary testing method that we are commercializing, we integrate through the whole battery lifecycle and extend the life, safety and reliability of batteries. As the industry focuses on increasing energy and power densities using highly flammable materials, battery safety and reliability becomes critical.
Battery SOH Overview
Why Does it Matter?
Failures caused during manufacturing, while in use, or after retirement result in billons of dollars of recalls, loss of lives and property. This is in addition to significant damage in brand and company reputation.
What Causes Battery Faults and Failures?
Battery faults and failures may be caused by numerous conditions including manufacturing and mechanical defects, charging behavior - including over-charge, under-discharge, over-temperature, and over-current events.
While we do not monitor all these conditions, these conditions often cause and manifest in an elevated self-discharge rate and in internal shorts. Internal shorts are the root cause of thermal runaway.
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The Novus Sentry proprietary method of testing is innovating in the early detection of internal shorts.
Technology
How We Do it?
Novus Sentry has a proprietary method of deriving a battery's self-discharge and correlating to the early detection of nascent short circuits - way before they become problematic. The early detection of internal shorts is critical for the prevention battery health degradation and ultimately thermal runaway.
Currently, there are no BMS or commercial diagnostic methods for such application.
What are Internal Shorts?
An internal short is a condition that happens when electrical current travels through an unintended pathway, or a shortcut, bypassing part of the circuit. Internal shorts are considered as the primary cause of battery failures and accidents.
There are various development phases associated with short-circuits. Internal shorts start from nascent shorts before transforming into soft shorts and finally hard shorts that cause catastrophic failures.
As soon as nascent shorts start occurring, unless measures are taken, irreversible damage to a battery’s health and performance ensues. There are currently no accepted industry methods to accurately and rapidly predict and detect internal shorts.
Self-Discharge
To characterize a battery’s state of health, our solution rapidly measures self-discharge rate in a highly non-disruptive and non-invasive way.
Our technology rapidly measures self-discharge rate in orders of magnitude faster than current methods. By testing and monitoring a battery’s SD, we unlock a new wave of valuable predictive analytics that guarantee the operation of a battery in a safe, efficient and reliable manner.
How We Do it?
Self-discharge (SD) denotes the condition where electrical capacity is lost when the battery is not used. Elevated SD rate is evidence of the existence of internal shorts and is widely accepted as a reliable estimator a battery’s safety and state of health.
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Due to the extensive time required by current methods, self-discharge is not a variable consistently tracked. This then makes the early detection of internal shorts more challenging.
Frequently Asked Questions
Testimonials
