Battery Analyzers: Battery Lifetime Testing

The UBA5 is ideal for testing a battery's lifetime and reliability. You can instruct the UBA5 to put a battery through hundreds (or more) of cycles. The cycles can be as simple charge/discharge cycles, or more complicated cycles that emulate expected usage, overcharge, overdischarge, undercharge or underdischarge the battery.

The UBA5 can control external devices during these tests, such as temperature chambers or external loads or chargers.

The UBA5 is ideal for lifetime testing because it records all the test results on a PC and it's inexpensive.

Below is a 50 cycle test of a 4Ah NiCd cell. For the first half of this test the battery capacity is actually increasing and then it levels off. Had we continued this test, it would be expected that the battery capacity would start to drop.

This is a 100 cycle test of a 1Ah lithium ion cell. We can see that for the first ten cycles the battery is performing at or above it's rated capacity. After that it performs below capacity, getting worse with each cycle.