course not
i agree with everything you said above. and i should have been more thorough with the build. im saying that i think its still a usable pack though and def much higher quality then many esk8 vendors make. (not battery builders rather some vendors)
not really possible as the pack is basically finished now and would prob require more heat to do that so… ruins the cells more
When u think about its kinda bullshit how a escoot can go that fast with such little discharge by comparison to a board
fuck these. They never fit and are the biggest PITA to plug and unplug
The whole point of my suggestion is that it DOESN’T require more heat (other than the heat of the spot welds, which is negligible). Re-read my post if that doesn’t make sense.
But it’s your pack man, and your risk. I just want you to be aware of the risks you’re taking and how to minimize them next time. It sounds like you get it mostly, so I’ll drop it for now.
ah yeah sorry i misread above. i thought you meant to remove the solder joints.
thanks man and i get you and will see about trying to remove. thank you again and whether i do or dont change this pack i will remeber it for next time
So… How about those copper-nickel “sandwiches”?
I have yet to hear anything bad about nickel plated copper strips, but I also have not heard a whole lot of good about them either. They are kinda just a question mark as far as I know.
Ease of welding? Presumably better than pure copper and worse than pure nickel. How much depends on the ratios and total thickness.
Current capability? Presumably better than pure nickel and worse than pure copper. How much depends on the ratios and total thickness.
Corrosion? Probably not a huge concern, maybe? Your pack shouldn’t be getting that moist anyway.
It’s expensive, thats for sure. And how do you rate it? If I am buying some for my business, then I need to justify that cost by calculating the exact benefits of it. That means figuring out how much of it I will need to use to replace my current pure nickel usage. Without any really good tests of these metrics, it’s hard to come down one way or the other on it.
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
Yeah who has ever said no to fireworks smh
Alright battery builders, I want your input on something. A customer of mine forwarded me an email that they got from the sales department at a company called “Soteria Battery Innovation Group.” Here is their website:
As you will notice reading through their site (only took me a few minutes to read through the whole thing, every page) it is very marketing-heavy and information-light. From what I can tell, they are a start-up founded in 2018 with venture capital from one major international backer.
As far as their product goes, it seems that their main technology is a claimed improvement on the polymer layer between the anode and cathode of a lithium ion cell. The claimed benefit of this technology is that batteries produced with it have a much lower chance of igniting into thermal runaway when punctured (such as by having a nail punched into the side of the can).
Check out this powerpoint I found, not on their website.:
Without knowing more about their technologies (like I said, their website is really really bare on info, and that powerpoint PDF doesnt really get into many specifics) I dont know if we can really say for sure if they have any innovations that would actually make a difference in the field of esk8 or not.
My intuition is to say that they probably do not, however. In esk8 (and most PEVs that I know of), the battery failures we see most often result from being short-circuited, usually caused by improper pack building techniques. We rarely see cells being punctured in the way that Soteria’s technology seems to be addressing.
So I’m wondering what yall think? @Battery_Mooch you might be the only person on the forum other than me who might find this to be interesting reading 
The technology they are claiming strikes me as very similar to the Sharp/STOBA batteries that were on the recycling market a while back, so I’ll also tag the resident STOBA expert @Scepterr.
No, IMO they don’t.
Only a tiny percentage of cell tech advances make it out of the lab and only a tiny percentage of those are successfully commercialized. This company has had this tech for over three years and AFAIK it has not made it into any commodity (widely used) cells. If it had the companies would have advertised it like crazy.
This is an advancement suitable only for niche applications. The current collectors for their cells use vapor deposited metal (onto plastic) instead of sheets of metal foil. These layers of deposited metal are incredibly thin. They have to be in order for the plastic layer to be able to pull the metal back and away from a high temperature area (where a short circuit occurred).
This much, much thinner layer of metal means the cell’s internal resistance has gone up and the current handling has gone down. These cells will probably only be high capacity and low current rated.
How about the cost too? This metallized plastic current collector material will cost a lot more than metal foil.
This new metallized current collector need to be connected to the metal tabs that carry the current to the top and bottom of the cell internally. But now instead of just one tab we need two, one for each side of the current collector material. This increases cost and may require new equipment, adding even more to the cell’s cost.
Can we even reliably connect to a layer of metal so thin we could probably see through it? Only particular types/shapes/sizes of cells might be suitable for this tech.
Their polymer separator uses a non-woven material that seems to claim it doesn’t pull back from a hot area where a short has occurred. There are other advancements in separator tech that can either help minimize problems if runaway starts or even help to prevent it in the first place. How expensive is Soteria’s material compared to the others? How thick is it? Do we have to sacrifice capacity for a thicker material? Is ion mobility affected? What about cost?
There are literally a bunch of battery tech announcements made every day. Almost none of them will ever be used in a commercially available cell. We have to realize that what we have in the cells we use now is all that survived the commercialization process for all the big battery tech discoveries announced years ago. Sure, there have been some genuine advancements like nano-materials, fire retardant electrolyte additives, better performing anode and cathode active materials, etc.
But hundreds and hundreds of other advancements never made it to market. They were either too expensive, required too much of a change to the existing manufacturing processes, or compromised capacity or performance too much to make the cell commercially viable for the markets they would be sold to.
I don’t think there’s a place for Soteria’s tech in the ”commodity” low cost cells that esk8 uses. I think Samsung, Sony, LG, Panasonic, Sanyo, or Molicel would have adopted it a long time ago if there was.
As brought up earlier by @BenjaminF, how common are short-circuits cause by puncture or crushing? Much more common are issues caused by misuse and not mishandling. Things like overcharging, charging when cold, soldering heat damage, use of salvaged cells, high discharge current rates, overdischarging, etc., are much more common causes of thermal runaway (or just benign cell failure).
Do we really need Soteria’s tech?
Or do we just need better education of the esk8 community?
Would we pay the price, literal and figurative, to use Soteria’s tech if it actually made it to a cell we could use? Higher cost cells and perhaps reduced ratings too?
An excellent reply, thank you Mooch! You confirmed many of my suspicions about this tech, and brought up a lot of good points that hadnt even occured to me. Thanks!
I’m glad I made the right choice in advising my customer against this startup 
You heard the man.
@moddedlife this right here is what I was talking about… top notch builders with hundreds of hours of knowledge/experience happily taking time out of their days to give loads amazing feedback.
Do what you’re capable of, post pictures, gather feedback, improve, and you can do just about anything needed to build amazing boards. This forum is awesome.
Hmm… I’ve never had too much of an issue with them, especially the “never fit” part. I think I’ve gotten the vast majority of mine from Hobbyking though, maybe it’s a quality control issue? Either way, you should always be able to slightly squish them together to make a looser fit. That’s what’s great about them. Other types just wear down and once they’re loose I don’t really trust them. I’m definitely guilty of not heat shrinking over some of my internal 3.5mm connections & they’ve surprisingly never come apart.
Sometimes they can be slightly tough to pull apart the first few times, but I use marine grade shrink on everything in Esk8 - seems to give enough grip to pull it apart just grabbing the shrink. No shame in using pliers either if needed.
Probably because I got mine from Amazon 
They’ve definitely gotten more expensive on Hobbyking over the past few years. Kinda wtf’d the last time I was after 5.5’s on Hobbyking.
Seems like one side is a bit weaker than the other, it may be the weak positive probe thing. Try doing this:
Other than that they look decent, though welding an actual cell is a bit different than a razor. I would test on a real cell next.
Yep, saw this a while ago and was gonna do something similar 
Thanks for the reminder lol
**side note: interestingly enough, I think it’s actually the negative side that’s usually making weaker welds; I will confirm later
