“The sea is everything. Its breath is pure and healthy.” That is how Captain Nemo described the ocean in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. A century and a half later, that breath is not what it used to be. The climate is faltering, the planet is ailing, and it is the ocean that has absorbed most of the heat.

We believe the recovery of the Earth begins with the recovery of the sea. And we believe healing the sea is not a matter of declarations, but of engineering: the technology to observe and understand the ocean, and the technology to circulate the energy we use, at sea and on land, more cleanly.

Why second-life batteries

ARC (Adaptive Research Corp.) is a mechatronics engineering company based in Jeju, South Korea. Our work is solving problems of the sea and of energy with embedded systems, or intelligent hardware.

The reason we focus on second-life batteries is simple: batteries are not going away. People have always moved toward convenience, and using energy without a wire is a convenience no one gives back once they have it. Batteries will keep getting smaller, lighter, and safer, and the more they do, the more of them we will use, and the closer to us they will be.

That is why we see boundless potential in battery units small enough for a person to carry. Taking a battery that has finished its first life in an electric vehicle, returning it to the smallest unit it can be broken down into, and putting it back to work in new settings at sea and on land. Today that unit is the battery module of an EV platform. When technology produces a smaller unit, our work will move there too.

ARC Current is where we record what we gather and learn along that journey.

Information, scattered

Anyone who has taken an interest in the second-life battery market knows this: information in this field is remarkably scattered. Recycling news lives in materials-industry media, reuse and remanufacturing in environmental policy documents, certification and regulation in ministry notices, prices on mineral market sites, and safety and diagnostics research in academic journals. Seeing the whole picture means digging through all of them, and the gap between Korean-language and English-language sources makes it harder still.

As a company working in this field, ARC has to track this information anyway. We decided it is better to keep that record in the open. That is where this blog begins.

What we cover

ARC Current will consistently cover six threads:

  • Recycling: material recovery technology and industry developments in Korea and abroad
  • Reuse and remanufacturing: refurbishment, ESS, and mobility applications, the second life of a battery
  • Policy, regulation, and certification: institutional changes, certification systems, and logistics rules
  • Industry players: with more weight on startups, in Korea and worldwide, than on the giants
  • Safety and technology: fire and thermal runaway, SOC/SOH estimation, and diagnostics
  • Supply data: public data on the volume and flow of retired EV batteries

We publish once or twice a week, and every post is available in both Korean and English. A price page with daily-updated mineral market data is also in the works.

Closing

This blog does not claim finished answers. It follows a moving market and keeps a record. Like Captain Nemo’s vessel, we intend to keep moving.

Contact: roxxxoul@gmail.com