Refurbished Lithium-ion Battery Pack (Complete)

Refurbished Lithium-ion Battery Pack

General Information:

    In the summer of 2021, I did an unpaid internship at my friend's family business, L&H Tag and Label in San Gabriel. My friend's dad, Mark, was the business owner and I worked on side projects that he had no time to do since he was on the manufacturing side.  

Objective:

    The objective of this project was to recycle Lithium-ion batteries from used life vests and to refurbish them into a battery pack.  

Contributions:

• Used pliers to open the plastic shell where the batteries were held, and did this process over 100 times. 
• Stripped down the batteries of three into individual cells. The pack of three batteries which were spot welded and applied a blob of glue to hold them together.
• Applied testing for each battery via multimeter, if batteries had low voltage then they were charged
• Repaired batteries without a skin, in case they were damage due to the stripping process, by applying heat shrink tubing. 
• Repackaged the batteries in an alternating side-by-side orientation by applying hot glue, spot welding, and soldering 

What I learned from this project:

    I learned soldering, battery testing, and efficiency

Sample Pictures/Videos:

Exposed batteries from plastic encasing of life vest, each unit comes as three batteries

A bunch of batteries

Each unit needs to be stripped down into individual cells and tested each batch by their year

If the purple casing was damaged during the removal process, heat shrink tubing is applied to not allow conductivity throughout the battery

Batteries were then lined up alternating their positive and negative ends and then spot welded and attached a BMS(battery management system)