Tech

The Certification Path for Remanufactured Batteries covered Korea’s pre-removal performance evaluation system, which grades retired EV batteries on three axes — performance, safety, and history — and sorts them into remanufacturing, reuse, or recycling. The performance axis is, in substance, remaining capacity: State of Health (SOH). Which grade a battery lands in decides whether it goes back into a car, into a second-life application like ESS, or back to raw material recovery. Even while the detailed grading criteria remain unwritten in subordinate legislation, the technical foundation underneath that grading — how SOH is actually measured — is worth laying out now. This piece covers what SOH means, what families of estimation methods exist, and why accuracy figures from lab studies on new cells don’t carry over cleanly to the field. ...

Nobody working on an EV’s high-voltage pack can confirm safety by looking at it. A connector that appears seated, or a cover that appears closed, tells you nothing about whether hundreds of volts are actually live behind it. HVIL — the High Voltage Interlock Loop — exists to take that judgment away from the person and hand it to a circuit. It matters most to whoever designs a retired-battery removal or remanufacturing process, because every step of handling that battery assumes this circuit is doing its job as designed. This piece covers what HVIL is and how it works, why high-voltage systems require it, how it’s physically built into packs and connectors, and what it means once a battery leaves the vehicle for remanufacturing. ...

K-BATTERY SHOW 2026, a Korean battery industry trade show held August 19–22, gave two startups their first real public exposure. Thot showed a robot called “Dismantlebot” built to automate the disassembly of retired EV batteries. Barkroad showed a battery pack reconfigured from retired cells and a modular power system built around it. Both companies showed these products at the event, so what follows keeps a hard line between what was demonstrated on the floor and what each company said about it. Performance figures and cost claims that can’t be independently checked are left out entirely. ...

Korea’s supply of retired EV batteries is growing fast. According to the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment, domestic volume reached 8,321 units in 2025 and is projected to hit 107,500 by 2030. That 2030 figure is still just a projection, though, and past forecasts have missed actual volume by a wide margin — a gap this piece revisits later as a supply-side variable. Ask where all of that can go, and the answer so far converges on one thing: energy storage systems (ESS). Anyone evaluating a second-life battery business wants to know why so few other uses have shown up, and whether that’s likely to change. Rather than listing applications, this piece starts from what actually changes inside a battery once it comes out of a car, and works forward from there. ...

A research team led by Professor Kim Ju-heon at Chung-Ang University’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Department of Intelligent Energy and Industry Convergence, with graduate researcher Kim Sang-woo, has developed a composite material that both slows the spread of heat inside lithium-ion batteries and absorbs the heat itself. The findings were published in Chemical Engineering Journal (impact factor 12.5). In a lithium-ion battery, excessive heat generated in one cell — from an internal short circuit, for instance — can spread rapidly to neighboring cells and trigger a chain reaction. That chain reaction, known as thermal runaway, is a leading cause of EV and energy storage system (ESS) fires. ...