The Challenge
Flow battery technology for utility-scale energy storage was commercially novel at the time of this engagement. Standard test methodologies, equipment specifications, and validation frameworks from adjacent industries did not directly apply — the electrochemical system, form factor, and operational profile were sufficiently distinct that engineering judgment had to be built from first principles rather than adapted from precedent.
The manufacturer needed test infrastructure capable of validating a product that was simultaneously being developed. Requirements evolved as the engineering team learned what the technology could and could not do. Test systems had to be designed for a target that was still moving.
Approach
The engagement began with a systematic analysis of what the technology actually needed to demonstrate at each stage of development — distinguishing between tests that answered engineering questions, tests that satisfied customer requirements, and tests that existed because they had always existed in adjacent industries. A significant portion of the inherited test burden fell into the third category and was eliminated.
New test stand designs were developed iteratively, with each system informed by operational experience from previous deployments. This meant early systems were necessarily over-specified in some dimensions and under-specified in others — a deliberate tradeoff that prioritized learning over false precision early in the program.
The thermal reliability chamber was designed to fill a specific gap: the existing test infrastructure could not subject systems to the temperature cycling required to understand long-term degradation behavior. Its design had to accommodate both the physical size of the units under test and the chemistry-specific constraints that made standard environmental chambers inappropriate.
When a critical reliability issue emerged that could not be diagnosed through conventional instrumentation — the failure mode was not producing observable signals through existing measurement points — a black box testing methodology was developed to characterize the behavior from external observations. This approach resolved the issue without requiring invasive modifications to the units under test, which would have compromised the validity of subsequent production testing.
Infrastructure Delivered
Six test systems were commissioned across the program, including two low-capacity versions for early-stage development work. Each system was designed for the test room expansion that was executed in parallel, which added capacity without interrupting ongoing testing. All six systems remain operational.
Cross-functional coordination was a consistent requirement throughout. Engineering, operations, business development, and executive leadership each had distinct and sometimes conflicting views of what the test program needed to accomplish. Translating between those perspectives — making the engineering constraints legible to business stakeholders and the business constraints legible to engineers — was as much a part of the work as the hardware itself.
What This Demonstrates
This engagement illustrates the core capability Novel Systems Engineering offers: the ability to build reliable infrastructure for technology where no established playbook exists. The specific domain was electrochemical energy storage, but the underlying engineering challenge — designing for a moving target, developing validation methodology from scratch, resolving reliability issues without precedent — is domain-independent.