Series · Foreword + 9 Parts · Insights
A practical guide to battery quality control.
For product companies and battery teams who own the quality of what they ship. Concrete, opinionated, and grounded in what actually works at scale. Updated as we publish.
In this series
The nine things every battery product company has to do.
Read the foreword, then read the chapter that matches where you are. Each one mirrors a step on the home page’s “What we do” stack.
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00Foreword
Why quality control matters.
Cell suppliers test for voltage and resistance. They don’t test for cycle life under your duty cycle, cold performance for your application, or abuse tolerance for your form factor. Datasheets describe a cell in isolation. Shipped products fail in the field, in customer hands, under conditions only you understand. That gap — between the supplier’s lab and your customer’s product — is what every battery program eventually owns. The rest of this guide walks through how to close it.
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01We coach you
Cell & supplier qualification.
Choosing which cells and suppliers to bring into your program. Datasheet review, sample testing, plant audits, and the rubric for moving from a long list of options to a short list you trust — with a documented decision you can defend later.
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02We coach you
Defining acceptance criteria.
What “good” actually means for your product. Cycle life under your duty cycle, capacity at your operating temperature, impedance after the storage period your product expects — not the supplier’s. Plus a rubric for translating customer requirements into test specifications.
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03We coach you
Designing the test protocol.
What to test, how many cells, and what “pass” means. Cycle life, cold cycling, short circuit, DCIR, formation, calendar aging, abuse arms — when each matters and how to size each test for the confidence you need without overspending on cycler time. Plus the sampling strategy that makes it work at production volume.
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04We connect you
Running the tests.
Where the cycling actually happens — in your lab, a partner’s lab, or both. How to structure the work so data flows back into your QC system without manual handoffs, and when to outsource which tests instead of buying more cycler channels.
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05In our software
Real-time alerts.
You can’t watch every batch. The mechanics of being notified the moment a cell trips a spec — email, SMS, dashboard — while there’s still time to act. Plus how to tune thresholds so the signal stays above the noise.
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06In our software
Traceability.
One place to trace every cell, module, and pack — from cathode lot to cell to customer shipment, linked end to end. The data model that makes recall containment a search rather than a fire drill.
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07In our software
Batch decisions.
Releasing a batch into your product is the moment everything before it pays off. We walk through the decision pattern: test results, supplier history, and spec compliance linked together — so “ship it” or “hold it” is grounded in evidence rather than gut.
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08In our software
Supplier accountability.
The data and reports a supplier can’t dispute. How to push back on commitments, claim refunds on non-conforming batches, and contain incidents — with documentation that holds up in front of your quality team and theirs.
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09We connect you
Compliance.
UN 38.3, IEC 62133, IEC 62660, EU Battery Passport, DO-311A, FDA, NDAA. The certifications most product companies need, what evidence each requires, and the partners that turn documentation into a byproduct of your QC system rather than a fire drill at audit time.
Need this for your product?
If you’d rather skip the reading, Micantis runs all of this for you — from defining the criteria through shipping with compliance documentation.