Preface In early 2009 as the US automotive industry was in the midst of its restructuring, I took advantage of the changing industry to join a new energy start-up and enter into the lithium- ion battery space. As I worked to make the transition from a major OEM to the lithium-ion battery industry, I purchased pretty much every book I could find on lithium-ion batteries looking for one that gave me the basic information, which I would need to be successful.
However, I found that while there were some good books on the market, they were either very technical and targeted at engineers or focused on different markets such as laptops or on different technologies such as Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries. Over the following years I spent a lot of time working with chemists, engineers, and battery scientists to learn as much as I could. However, about 18 months ago I was speaking to a colleague who was asked a simple question as we were coming out of a meeting—how do you know all of this stuff?
And it occurred to me that there may be a need for a tool to help people, who are working in the lithium-ion battery industry but are not battery experts but who still need to gain a better understanding of the industry and the products in order to do their jobs better. In other words, I decided to write the book that I wish I had when I started in the industry. I spent a lot of time thinking back to that time and the types of questions that I had. As someone who had spent a career in engineering organizations but was not an engineer, I had to ask a lot of questions and made a lot of crib notes but I could not find a single source for everything I was trying to learn.
This book is the realization of that knowledge gap in the industry. This book is intended for everyone; you do not have to be an engineer in order to gain an understanding of batteries. In fact, as the battery industry has grown so much over the past 10 years, there have been a lot of new people coming into the battery world from other industries. That means a lot of people with great experience in their various specialties who now need to learn about lithium-ion batteries.
Maybe you are a student in one of the new energy storage system programs that are beginning to sprout up in universities across the world, or perhaps you are a purchasing manager who is now tasked with buying a whole new set of components and have no idea what it is they are, or what if you are a thermal engineer who has now moved into the battery world—this book is for you! xiii