Micha Kirchgessner
Bio
Micha Kirchgessner holds the R&D Electrochemical Laboratory Manager position at PENOX in Ohrdruf, Germany. His responsibilities include implementing and developing new test methods, planning test series in the context of basic research, developing new battery additives, and providing technical support to customers from the battery industry. He joined PENOX in 2013 and was previously responsible for the R&D chemical laboratory. Before joining PENOX, he worked for five years as IP Manager and R&D Engineer at EXIDE Technologies in Büdingen, Germany. Micha holds an M.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
In 2022, Penox and the Austrian Battery Research Laboratory (ABR) decided to investigate the status of selected automotive battery technologies. The technical collaboration seeks to understand better the robustness and remaining optimization potentials of advanced automotive technologies such as EFB and AGM. The survey study presented fundamental performance values, such as the 50% and 17.5% DoD cycle lives for selected aftermarket batteries (all data is strictly anonymous). Furthermore, the study highlights technical limits and typical performance variations per technology for state-of-the-art batteries. Failure modes in laboratory testing and from field return batteries are compared and discussed. Furthermore, ABR has developed advanced testing procedures to predict battery failure and has studied the remaining ‘fitness’ of replaced automotive batteries in Austria and Germany. The surprising result was a high share of batteries that had been replaced and could effectively be operated afterwards. This learning underlines the need for more robust criteria to distinguish irreversible failures from weak electrical performance caused, for example, by undercharging conditions. The technical survey was performed with different but comparable battery types and sizes obtained from the EU battery market and the field, including return batteries in Austria and Germany, and is entirely anonymous. The intention is to provide a pre-competitive (critical/unbiased) review of the remaining improvement of European automotive battery technology. The technical collaboration of ABR and PENOX is open for a pre-competitive development of automotive (aftermarket) batteries in Europe and elsewhere, for example, South America.
