We proudly announced today that the new LG flagship smartphone, the LG V30, includes Qnovo’s adaptive charging technology. The V30 uses Qnovo’s QNI solution, our most sophisticated algorithms to manage its lithium-ion battery. In this post, we open our doors to give our readers insight to our technology and QNI in particular.

As complex and exotic as the battery may seem, you, the consumer, care only about a handful of things.

First, will the battery last you a whole day of use, no marketing gimmicks?

Second, will it charge fast enough? You don’t need blink-of-an-eye-charging but you don’t want to wait long too.

Third, will it last you at least two years or more, given that you are paying a premium price?

And lastly, can you rely that it will not risk your safety and the safety of those around you?

These attributes collectively define your overall battery experience; not one of them, but all of them together.

To last you a full day, the battery must have plenty of charge capacity, i.e., a lot of mAh. This is equal to a range between 3,000 to 3,500 mAh for today’s crop of smartphones. Anything more than that will make the smartphone unwieldy or too thick. To fit a 3,000 mAh battery in the small physical space inside a smartphone means high energy density. Today’s state of the art is near 650 Wh/l operating at a maximum voltage of 4.4 V. That’s the first headache already. At this high voltage and high energy density, the battery is really not happy and needs a lot of caring. I mean a lot of caring!

Fast charging the battery amplifies all the concerns of high voltage and high energy density, and makes them a lot worse. And if you have to charge more than once a day, well, this battery will need even more caring.

High energy density, high voltage and fast charging together are the factors that make the battery fail before two years, and risk making your battery unsafe.

Therein lies the challenge. How do we care for the battery ? and why has this required level of care become so much more sophisticated than ever before ?

As the old adage goes, “You can’t fix what you can’t measure.”

This leads to an important and critical new concept for batteries: Measuring what is happening within the battery, all the time, in real time, and then deciding what to do. By “within” I mean the “chemistry” that is taking place inside the battery…the stuff that you don’t see. This is called, in engineering terms, closed-loop feedback. Engineers know it, study it, and use it in countless situations.

Qnovo’s software adapts to your smartphone a measurement technique widely used in battery laboratories. It is called electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (abbreviated as EIS). It helps our scientists understand what happens inside the battery without destroying it. Qnovo’s innovation is in implementing EIS in your smartphone so that it is always monitoring your battery’s internal chemical processes.

We announced earlier this year that the Qualcomm® Snapdragon 835 that powers the LG V30 includes hardware that accelerates Qnovo’s algorithms. Indeed, the additional hardware in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset extends the utility of EIS inside the smartphone. The hardware in this new chipset enables measurements and frequencies that were not available in older chipsets. Qnovo’s QNI software takes advantage of this new hardware to gain deeper insight into the battery, again all in real time.

Now we get to the second portion of closed loop: What to do after making a measurement. As it turns out, and we thank science for that, charging the battery is a powerful knob to alter and affect what happens inside the battery. Qnovo’s adaptive charging takes the information from the EIS measurement, and then adjusts the charging current to reduce and mitigate possible harmful reactions detected during previous measurements.

With QNI, this “closed loop” happens a lot faster than its sister software product, QNS. As a result, it is able to detect more potential problems and react appropriately. Throughout a single charge, QNS makes approximately 200 measurements on the battery, whereas QNI makes close to 20,000 measurements.

Over the past years, we have collected a gigantic database of measurements on batteries from the vast majority of battery manufacturers. We have tested large quantities of batteries under diverse and extreme conditions. This knowledge allows Qnovo to train our algorithms to make them more efficient and more accurate especially as battery materials continue to evolve.

The skeptic might ask, “Great, but how does it help me, the end user?”

The most important benefit that the user derives is the health of the battery. You get a healthy battery AND more capacity AND fast charging…in other words, the consumer gets a great battery experience encompassing the attributes mentioned at the beginning of this post.

You, the consumer, do not have to worry whether your usage might hurt the battery. You don’t have to worry about fast charging because it might damage the battery. You don’t have to worry about charging to less than full because it helps the battery’s longevity. None of these should be your concerns and none should keep you thinking about the battery. Qnovo’s adaptive charging takes care of these battery issues in the background, and gives you a healthy battery with the best user experience.

So, if you are in the market for a new smartphone, do consider an LG V30 and do enjoy its battery experience.

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