Electric vehicle (EV) battery, once failed, there is no way to look inside—to get know what is wrong—without destroying it. A new MRI-based method, developed by a group of researchers, is capable of checking EV battery inside.

Based on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a press release by the University of Cambridge says, the new method also leads into the possibility battery performance enhancement and safety by serving as a diagnostic of its internal workings.

“Now, researchers at Cambridge University, Stony Brook University, and New York University have developed methodology, based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to do just that.”

MRI has been huge success in diagnosing human’s body, but not vehicle battery’s body—which is dominated by the “presence of metal.” Conducting surfaces effectively block the radio frequency fields that are used in MRI to see beneath surfaces, the release says. The researchers, however, turned this limitation into a new method, the release reveals.

“Using lithium-ion batteries, for example, the team was able to directly visualize the build-up of lithium metal deposits on the electrodes after charging the battery. Such deposits can also detach from the surface, eventually leading to overheating, battery failure, and – in some cases – to fire or explosion.”

According to the release, visualizing small changes on the surface of the batteries’ electrodes allows, in principle, for the testing of many different battery designs and materials under normal operating conditions. The researchers, as cited on the release, also add that the methods developed could leads into battery performance enhancement. (via: “Researchers develop method to examine batteries—from the inside” by the University of Cambridge.)