Batteries and Standardized Modules

Most application engineers are looking for batteries to fit into their applications rather than to build their own batteries from cells. Planar offers engineering assistance and design services to properly size batteries and engineer a package to meet customers' specifications.

Planar batteries are based upon Planar's large range of building block cells. They are configured in various series and parallel connections to meet requirements of voltage, current, run time, pulse and environmental requirements. Planar can satisfy a wide range of characteristics from small low drain applications to large high power applications for consumer, military, automotive and stationary markets. Planar capabilities range in capacities from 50 mAh to many mega-watthours, currents from microamps to thousands of amperes, voltages from 3A to more than 600V.

Planar uses standardized designs and construction techniques to most efficiently address customer's applications. Low voltage batteries use standardized header designs, but are constructed as single modules. Planar has a number of standard configurations in popular voltages such as 12V (4S), 28V (7S) and 48V (13S). The capacity of these is determined by the choice of cells. High voltage batteries are most often designed in modules of 10 cells in series due to voltage limitations of the battery management systems chips. Modules are configured from standard cells, selected by capacity, duty cycle and power requirements. Thermal management is designed in at the module level. The modules have heat dissipating interconnects, convective or forced air cooling, ruggedized vibration resistant housings and each module has a battery management system slave board for individual monitoring and control. The module can contain 1, 2 or 3 cells in parallel in a single assembly. In the prismatic design, cells or parallel groupings of cells are separated by thin plates to stabilize the cells, maintain uniform cell temperature, sink the heat to the case, provide added cooling surface and to protect the interconnects from shorting. In the design for cylindrical cells, the structural cells are positioned with non-metallic headers and the cell interconnects are cooled. Batteries are then assembled from modules, by adding the MBS master, disconnects, cooling fan(s), communication and case per agreed specifications and customer acceptance of design.