Liminal’s EV Battery Inspection Tech Could Prevent Fires, Attracts ‘Battery Czar’ As Advisor

While the auto and greater mobility industry races to build more factories to produce batteries to power their growing portfolio of electric vehicles, there’s growing concern over sometimes fatal fires ignited by those batteries due to manufacturing flaws.

To try to catch those flaws before they reach the marketplace, Emeryville, Calif. firm Liminal has not only developed a technology to do so, but announced Monday it has brought on as a strategic advisor Denise Gray, known in the industry as the “battery czar.”

To earn that respect, Gray is best known for running the battery program for the Chevy Volt during her 30-year tenure at General Motors Co.

More recentely, she served as the North American Head of External Affairs and Government Relations for South Korean lithium-ion battery producer LG Energy Solution after previously serving as President of the company’s U.S.-based subsidiary LG Energy Solution Michigan, Inc. Tech Center.

“My goal as an advisor is just to support Liminal in meeting its goals, from technology, from, working in this industry, whatever they need, I want to be able to help,” said Gray in an interview.

“Her deep understanding of what it takes to get batteries into the market, the importance of quality, the importance of safety, the importance of the partnerships and the relationships that’s required—all of these things are really crucial to what we need to do to get to market quickly because a lot of what we need to do also is not just develop a great product, but build the relationships and build the credibility to actually you know, have major companies like Ford and GM, you know, trust us as a company,” said Hsieh in an interview.

Incorporated in 2015, Liminal grew out of post-doctoral research by Hsieh and the company’s co-founders at Princeton University. After what Hsieh described as a “soft start” Liminal began full-time operations in May of 2016.

Using a combination of ultrasound and machine learning, Liminal’s EchoStat system conducts a sort of deep-dive inspection of batteries while they’re in production. It’s technology Hseih believes so effective it could catch the kind of flaws blamed for fires in Chevrolet Bolt EVs leading to a massive recall and halt in production.

“We’re actually able to measure the physical properties of the battery in real time and so things like, you know, we can we can kind of sense what the physical parameters are that lead to how well the battery’s going to perform in the field, both in terms of its expected lifetime, we can also detect some of the defects that actually caused the Bolt’s recall and we’re starting to be able to develop the ability to detect other defects like electrode misalignments, that are known to cause other quality and recall issues as well. So you know, really able to detect physical issues that are currently undetectable by kind of the state of the art methods today,” Hsieh explained.

While the last seven years have been mainly focused on research and development, Hsieh says later this year EchoStat will be integrated into what he termed “a major European battery factory” for validation purposes.

The company has also caught the attention of investors, having landed $17.5 million in Series A2 funding this past February and in April, a $2.75 million grant from the California Energy Commission.

The promise of Liminal’s technology to help prevent potentially catastrophic events due to flaws in battery production is also what attracted Denise Gray to lend her deep expertise to the company.

“The products that people pay big money to purchase, and, quite frankly, safety and reliability are the top two most important items when it comes to whatever you do,” said Gray. “Reliability and safety are first and foremost, and so the technology that Liminal was bringing upon on board is helping out in both of those areas. So quite frankly, technology that helps to support reliability and safety and that’s what drew me.”

The need to catch and mitigate flaws in batteries for electric vehicles, including e-scooters and e-bikes, is only becoming more urgent as the incidence of fires persists, more products enter the market and automakers and suppliers rush to boost battery production.

Indeed, Hsieh warns, that ensuing battery boom only adds to the onus on the industry to take steps to insure safer batteries are produced, explaining, “The Chevy Bolt issue that was like a somewhere in the mid to 10 parts per million defects. But when you’re talking about billions of cells produced, tens of billions of cells produced, that’s a lot of cars that have those issues. And so, yeah, I mean, I think the big challenge is how do we keep up with demand? How do we go faster while also not sacrificing on quality and safety?”