Hello, I'm your host Grayson Brulte. Welcome to another episode of SAE Tomorrow Today, a show about emerging technology, the leaders, and innovators who make it all happen. On today's episode, we're absolutely honored to welcome Lisa King, Director of Advanced Battery Strategy at Leap Manufacturing, and Jeff Yamch, Chair of the SAE Battery Cell Standardization Committee. On today's episode, we'll explore how SAE J3016 and how this standard could improve battery safety and strengthen the future of electrification. We hope you enjoy this episode. Jeff, Lisa, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you very much for having me be here.
It's great to have you here because this is a highly technical conversation, but it's also a very important conversation. And Jeff, we're going to kick this conversation off with you, sir. Without a common technical language for cell size and testing, things are bottlenecked by a lack of interchangeability. It happens. Is this what J3016 is hoping to achieve to overcome?
Yeah, that's exactly what we're trying to overcome here. Right now, the market is relatively small for the uncrewed aerial vehicles, and it's custom by default. So again, I don't care if you're in the military, I don't care if you're the commercial side, everybody kind of does their own thing. And again, it's equivalent to what happened, you know, 20 years ago when electric vehicles started coming out. You know, every cell supplier has a different footprint, especially on the pouch side. So what this really does is it tries to commonize for a number of reasons. There's a physical envelope from the standpoint that we want to be interchangeable, simply in my opinion to really drive more commercialization. The goal is really not to freeze the innovation, but it's to standardize the interface so that when you look forward, you have a certain amount of cell sizes that are applicable. So you don't have the Wild West of 20 years ago where you had, you know, I remember John Warner, I think, did the original cell standardization, and I think at one time he was telling me, I think it was like 123 different cell sizes. Really can't commonize, really can't go into production at high level, so to reduce cost. So it's really driven the reason for this. So I would say one final thing, good way to frame it, is that we're trying to move this market from custom cell to custom pack, custom qualification towards a standard envelope qualification and faster integrations.
I'm going to ask you the big question: is the overarching goal here to get ahead of the growth that is coming in this industry before it takes off, to have some sort of standardization to kind of, if you want to use the term, I guess, a rocket pack or a booster to help lift it off?
Yeah, in my opinion, yes. Again, if you allow all the people in Group 1 to identify their own packaging space as opposed to the industry, the battery industry identifying it, it will take off much quicker. Again, even EVs and other applications, because it was so random, it's taken a long time to get to that standardization. If we get out in front of it for this application and future applications as well, the time to market much quicker when you have that standardized envelope, that standardized pack, that standardized cell, everybody knows from a drone perspective what they're building to. Now that doesn't say that, you know, somebody can build a very specific one and want to go out and do their own thing. But in this case, we're giving them all the parameters, all the tools, all the qualifications to be able to say, here's what you're building towards, or here's your building space, here's your qualifications. If you need something beyond that, then that may be a discussion with the cell manufacturer, but this really helps to move the industry forward.
Lisa, with all these moving parts, to me, I'm sitting here as a layman. Oh boy, complication central. How does this affect system designers? Are they cheering you on and saying, yes, standardization, we can focus on building really great products? Is that what's happening?
Yeah, believe it or not. When we first started this, there was a lot of pushback, right? And you can imagine that the OEMs were like, well, I have my proprietary thing and I want it to do what I want it to do and I want it to be a certain size to match to my vehicles. But at the end of the day, the battery piece has been an afterthought. So they built the vehicle and then they attached the battery pack later. And so once they realized two things, one was that, you know, they needed to start thinking about things in a more systemic level, like the whole thing operates as a system. Maybe they have platforms where the same battery works on different vehicles or they have a vehicle that uses different batteries. But they needed to start thinking in that manner. The other aspect of this is the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act, Section 842, and that is going to create some difficulty among the pack manufacturers and the OEMs in that the batteries themselves have to be primarily non-FEOC, and I'll explain what that is in a second. They need to contain non-FEOC materials. And FEOC stands for Foreign Entities of Concern. So from a U.S. Department of War perspective, they are now examining the risk in obtaining batteries solely from one country, and that is China. And so because they would like to spread that risk around now, then, you know, it's necessary for there to be industry outside of China. And to do that, we have to standardize because there's no other way to build capacity.
You're correct about the standardization. But before we go down that path, you brought up a very, I'll call it interesting point that I'd love to get your take on, and Jeff, I'd love to get your take on this as well. Battery is an afterthought. Well, where's the power going to come from to move if you don't have the battery? To me, it seems like, okay, that should be first thing on the drawing board. And then yet, no, we don't have it on the drawing board. Oh, oh, we need something to move it. Why is that the afterthought?
I can tell you, I've been a battery engineer my entire career, but when I have worked with systems engineers who build the, you know, part of the product that's going out into the world, frequently they just view the battery as a power source and not something necessarily that is an integrated part of the system. So they may think about the motor in terms of, you know, how much lift I need or how much duration I need to run this particular application, and then they just look for a battery that meets that. Where from a battery engineer's perspective, the system works as a whole. So you have your charging, you have your powertrain, that's your motor and your electronics array, and then you have your power source, and they all work together. So believe it or not, that is a thing in an OEM environment.
I'm curious, Jeff, what are your thoughts on we don't really need it until we need it?
I would certainly echo everything that Lisa said, having played an engineer at work for a number of years. I would totally agree with Lisa's assessment. I think part of it too is that if you use the automotive industry as kind of the platform for which things get built, or maybe the model for which things get built, a lot of times the designer of the vehicle, if you will, considers certain components to be off the shelf. Lead-acid batteries, you know, there's only maybe 150 BCI sizes. So they'll find one that works. A lithium-ion is significantly different, both in performance and space allocation. And I think that the mindset is that a lot of times the battery, well, we'll find one that fits when we need it. And really they should be, because the battery is such a main component to this. I mean, it is the engine. It's the engine and the gas tank, if you will. And that they really need to be considered in the initial design phase of any application, and they are a considerably costly component to actual the vehicle itself. Again, whether it's the aerial vehicle, whether it's a ground vehicle, whether it's a stationary power, whatever it may be, the battery has to now become considered as part of the core design.
And as Lisa pointed out, there's, I'll use the term, I won't use alphabet soup, but we'll use the term, there's regulations that you have to abide by. And I'm curious. So if you wait till the last minute, it seems to me, Jeff, that you could potentially have supplier lock-in. Okay, so we're going to go with supplier Acme, and then all of a sudden to me that becomes an emerging risk because all of a sudden if supplier Acme has an issue, it's like, okay, now where do we go? When do the individuals start to think about supplier lock-in when they're developing this technology?
Again, in my opinion, that should be really upfront as well. You can't build, you can't build a vehicle, again, whatever the vehicle may be, and then start picking suppliers simply because you might have a supplier that has the right chemistry but maybe not the right format or fit. You might have the right fit or format but it doesn't have the correct qualifications. So it really is beneficial when you're designing any vehicle to keep the major component suppliers, you know, nuts, bolts, things like that, fine. But when you're talking about a motor, a battery, certain parts that need to be commonized from a high-growth standpoint, it really needs to be considered upfront. And really, that's what J3016 does. It says, okay, in the future, all of you cell manufacturers, all you pack manufacturers have this space to live in. It's up to you if you want to choose to use that space or play in that market, but if you're going to, this is a space you're going to have.
And that's a really good point here, Lisa. J3016 bases pouch cell dimensions on compatible existing 21700 cylindrical cells. Why is that?
So within, at least within the military space, there are a great deal of battery packs that are manufactured using cylindrical cells, and cylindrical cells are somewhat commoditized in the market, 18650s and 21700s. They can be purchased from many different suppliers in many different configurations. At one point when I worked at Stanley Black & Decker, we had well over 40 different cylindrical cells that had different guts, but they were the same shape form, and they were all used for different types of product. So you have the same thing happening within the UAS space. So what we found was that the more powerful battery packs, the ones that needed more run time, so more duration, they were tending to now specify 21700 cells because they could get that higher energy density, they could get that higher power levels, they had better thermals than the 18650 cells did. However, some of the cutting-edge vehicle manufacturers have started to go to pouch cells. And there is a design difference between the two other than the format, but that has to do with how the electrodes are arranged within the cell. And so cylindrical cells tend to get a very hot core and they don't release their heat as well. The heat transfer is not as good. Pouch cells being very planar, having larger surface area, they can dissipate that heat better. There's also a construction difference in that the internal resistance of the cell is much lower because you have many tabs connected or a continuous tab connected to the outside. So we found that many of the bigger UAS suppliers were starting to use pouch cells, but those are only coming from China. So that's why they wanted to mitigate that risk by, okay, I can use a 21700 if I can't get this cell from China until we could build a supply chain elsewhere.
Now I have to put on the I'm not an engineer hat, but I'm a curious hat. What impact does that have on manufacturing?
Huge. So we talk about cylindrical cells in a manufacturing environment. It's a well-established product. There are hundreds of cylindrical lines in the world right now that are running at very fast speeds. I mean, we're talking about 300 to 400 cells per minute. A pouch cell is a much slower process. It takes, I think the fastest lines are running somewhere in the 100 parts per minute range. So maybe one quarter of the fastest speeds. Couple that with the very custom nature of those footprints. You know, top manufacturers may have well over 100 different size cells in their line card, where cylindrical, it's 18650 or it's 21700. Now they may play with those within the tolerances of those dimensions. However, they're still 18s and 21s. But those pouch cells are so varied. It really does help them aggregate demand so that they can run faster, they can make better investments in the future.
You're taking something that's massively complicated and making it a little bit less complicated. Is that the right way to summarize that?
Well, to me that unlocks performance. Jeff, from a performance perspective, what does J3016 unlock?
I would say amongst the greatest benefits of it is from a standardization standpoint, your production suddenly becomes understandable. And what I mean by that is imagine creating a drone for some government function and then realizing that nobody on the planet can really make that cell. Then you have to go back and say, okay, well, we can make it, but it's also going to cost you, you know, $20,000 a cell. So by standardizing it, it alleviates a lot of the issues around unknowns when you have a specific qualification, when you have a specific packaging space, when you have a specific cell size. So again, between packaging and cell size, you know what the stackup will look like. And so by standardizing it, it really eliminates a lot of unknowns, and not only eliminates them, it puts them up front. It puts the known up front so you know what you're getting into when you start designing this.
But so you're saying today, but the battery industry across all vehicle types is just moving at such a rapid pace. As Lisa correctly pointed out, you have the regulatory issue there. How do you as the committee chair stay ahead of this to ensure that the standard is always at the forefront and not coming up from behind?
Yeah, again, we're going to review it, you know, every six months, every 12 months. I think it's also upon not only the leaders, the participants, that industry also has to raise flags when they see something that could change it, might need to be included, altered, whatever that may be. So again, on our side as the people who ran it, the people who wrote it, we need to be aware of what's going on and we need to bring that up. But again, because we are individual volunteers working in our own spaces, it's really upon the industry to review, raise the hand when something new comes up, a new development, whatever it may be, so that we can stay ahead.
I'd like to add to that. So there is a way in which we crafted this that allows us to use backward-looking technology, right? So when we created these size standards, we did quite a market look to see what is being used now, and we tried to make sure that we were on target with those cells being used today. But we also left it chemistry-agnostic so that future technology can then be put into this format. So we're not specifying performance. We're not specifying chemistry or anything like that. It is simply the footprint and the thickness. That's it.
I'll simplify it this way. You left wiggle room, which I like. You left wiggle room. But then the hard part becomes interpretation. How do you manage the, you have the wiggle room, but then I'm sorry to say individuals interpret things in different ways. How do you balance that?
So some of the things that we did require the proof of performance, right? So you're giving them this envelope that they have to put their technology into, right? You're allowing them to choose their tab configuration. So tabs on the same side, tabs on opposite side, and for different types of cells, you may want one or the other. We're also requiring that those cell manufacturers perform a group of tests that sort of conform their performance data in a certain way. So an OEM can look at that data and say, okay, I see how this cell is different from this cell here, and it is kind of keeping them in the lane instead of allowing them to just showcase whatever they would like to. It really kind of keeps them in line with how this is standardized in some way.
