In this article, we are going to discuss the POWEROAD Low-Temperature batteries, which are also called PRLB, a product line of POWEROAD Renewable Energy LiFePO4 Battery products. People are talking about the benefits of transferring from Lead-Acid batteries to Lithium-ion batteries, however, lithium batteries have a significant limitation when it comes to charging, and the charging capabilities of lithium-ion battery is limited above 0℃.
Charging the lithium-ion batteries below 0℃ will cause permanent damage to the battery cells, even if just did it for one time.
POWEROAD engineered a brilliant solution to resolve this UNSOLVEABLE problem, the answer is PRLB, we will talk about what is PRLB, how it performs, why PRLB is needed, and how it can work for various applications.
WHAT IS PRLB?
The POWEROAD PRLB Series consists of the PRLB-100, PRLB-150, PRLB-150D, PRLB-200, PRLB-300 and PRLB-24100. As you may have understood, the numbers refer to the capacities of the relative batteries, PRLB-24100 means PRLB 24 Volt 100Amp hour. The PRLB batteries are armed with an immersive heating pad surrounding the Grade A LiFePO4 cells, and we added a Bluetooth plugin which allows the users to monitor the batteries wirelessly.
You may wonder, why there are heating pads in the assembly?
What happens if we charge the batteries below 32°F (0°C)
The lithium-ion phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries function from the lithium-ion positron transferring, the medium of this transaction is the electrolyte and the electrochemical potential of metal. The best working temperature range of lithium-ion batteries is 0°C to 50°C, theoretically speaking, the lithium-ion batteries can discharge at the temperature range of -20°C to 60°C and can charge above 0°C.
When lithium-ion batteries discharge, the lithium ions intercalate into the cathode, you can imagine this reaction as the lithium ions are on the way back to where they were, it is a simple circulation of the lithium ions.
However, it is different to charge the lithium battery at a freezing temperature. When charging the battery in a freezing condition, lithium ions will not be navigated to the path they should have been to transfer from the cathode to the anode due to the slow movement of the ions. The dissociative ions will be plated on instead of intercalating into the anode, causing battery capacity to decrease and increasing battery resistance, this damage is permanent. When enough plating is accumulated, it can break the separator and cause dangerous short.
How Do the PRLB batteries work?
When we talk about the PRLB, we are talking about BMS, when the temperature meets conditions (battery cells temperature below 0°C), the BMS automatically distributes the charging current to the immersive heating pads. The heating pads heat the battery cells until the battery cells have reached a safe temperature range for charging. Uniform internal heating is a very important feature of the PRLB batteries since most lithium batteries can only be heated up by the external heat source, which could cause unevenness of heat, leading to uneven charging of the battery cells. It may take 1 to 2 hours to heat the battery cells to the specified temperature depending on the real scenarios.
This brilliant feature brings the benefits of an extended maintenance-free experience to the users, users will not need to pull out the batteries for heating up on the cold days to charge, all they needed to do, is just plug in the charging cable, and let the batteries and chargers handle the rest.
Which PRLB batteries users should choose?
The PRLB self-heating battery lineup can be used in almost any frozen weather application, users can config their PRLB configuration just like configuring a regular off-grid power system, it all depends on the capacity needs, moreover, the PRLB-100 and PRLB-150D are more suitable for RVing.
If you are interested in the POWEROAD PRLB batteries, please do not hesitate to leave us a message and contact our specialists.
