Steve Jobs from Apple said: “People don't know what they want until you show it to them". He was against any form of market research but invented products that people did not know were needed. He was a true visionary. Working with GE as a service technician, I learned that the battery is the most common cause for failures in two-way radios. After discovering a way to rejuvenate NiCd batteries, I built a battery analyzer in 1981 that turned into successful and began to sell. The Cadex battery analyzer was unique in that it showed capacity by percentage with assumption that a new pack would deliver 100%. With capacity known, end of battery life became generally known as 80% for most uses.

Allowing your inner voice to prevail

In 1988, I added the Auto program governed by the Target Selector, an automation that would restore batteries which fell below the target setting. Making the battery analyzers available with custom battery adapters opened the market to public safety, oil patches, defense organizations and health care. The C7 with replaceable SnapLock adapters stabilized a new standard in battery analyzers for its simple usage.

In 2004, Cadex was first to analyze starter batteries with Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS). The full potential of Spectro™ is not yet known as accuracy rests on the Matrix Integrity Level (MIL). The non-invasive test reads battery capacity and other characteristics in about 30 seconds without the unit heating up. The EIS Direct Drive expands the testing range to large batteries of 300Ah from 12 to 48V.

Starter batteries use the generic matrix with pass/fail classification. A pass gives a grace period to next service, fail calls for replacement even if cranking is still strong. The Spectro device reads capacity, the leading health indicator of a battery. Research shows that capacity is the cause of failure in 48 batteries out of 100. CCA failure is only 12 in 100.

Custom matrices for specialty batteries can be created by testing retired batteries with the Data Acquisition Unit (DAU). The DAU is portable lab that we send to interested parties to scan retired batteries as they become available from time to time. The pool of batteries forming the matrix also requires the addition of new batteries to satisfy the full state-of-health range.

Each custom matrix requires at least 12 batteries of diverse capacity, distributed evenly similar to the pillars of a bridge. The more batteries that are scanned within a given performance level, the more articulate the readings become. Our goal is to advance MIL to attain numeric capacity readings, but how far to go is governed by the user, time and the availability of batteries.

A matrix resembles a bridge suspended by pillars

The matrices are stored in the Matrix Library that is made accessible by Cloud Analytics. Using custom matrices to test the performance of unique battery models opens a new level of battery analysis that we call Deep Battery Diagnostics. Service technicians are well aware that voltage and load tests are unable to read battery capacity. Testing by batteries by Deep Battery Diagnostics delivers the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of a battery by revealing the Minimum Operational Reserve Energy (MORE) With Cloud Analytics, battery users and fleet supervisors have access to the history of each battery from workforce to retirement.