British firm Mahle Powertrain opens new facility for EV battery testing

LONDON: Mahle Powertrain has opened a new, dedicated facility for the extensive testing of battery modules.

The facility, based at the powertrain specialist’s Northampton technical centre on the outskirts of the capital, enables the strip-down and disassembly of modules and compact vehicle batteries for post-test assessment, and provides a climate-controlled environment to carry out real-world simulated testing with the aim of streamlining the test and validation stages of emerging technologies.

“With electrification seemingly the automotive industry’s preferred method for achieving stringent future emissions targets, there is a very time and cost-sensitive need to develop enabling technologies such as the battery module,” said Simon Reader, Mahle’s director of engineering services.

“The new facility has been developed to provide an extensive capability that aids battery assessment, test and optimisation. In-house development of such a facility would be time and cost-prohibitive for OEMs and so it makes perfect sense for Mahle Powertrain, which can provide an end to end powertrain solution, to offer a broad range of expertise and capability that’s able to accelerate development time while reducing cost, in one place.”

As well as offering post-assessment suitability analysis, the battery pack assembly and testing facility enables testing under simulated drive-cycle conditions to evaluate the performance of battery systems in real-use environments.

Assembly of new prototype units is also possible at Mahle Powertrain’s new highly modular facility, which can conduct dynamic test cycles and steady state characterisation testing with or without battery management systems in-situ.