A high capacity cell from Sanyo or is it Panasonic (Panasonic owns Sanyo). The naming match the Panasonic naming (NCR18650B for 3400mAh), but the wrapper is Sanyo style with Sanyo name on it (If you can find it, the letters are small and not very visible).
Discharge curves looks good, they track nicely.
In this test I do overload the cell, it is only rated for 7A.
Thank you HKJ, for your testing and for providing us with invaluable information.
It’s very interesting to see how the NCR18650BL outperforms the NCR18650B. But why would they (Sanyo=Panasonic) improve their flagship and market it under their low budget brand? Beats me.
Word has it the NCR18650BL is of the same basic chemistry (LiNiCoAl) as the NCR18650B but they must have done some changes resulting in much less voltage sag. Even the protected version of Enerpower has a respectable discharge curve.
And the NCR18650BL seems to be a good replacement for a lot of cell types up to 5A, be it LiNiCoAl (NCR18650B), LiCo (UR18650FM) or LiNiCoMn (INR18650-25R). The cell certainly got my attention.
The cell I look forward to is the LG MJ1. From some other tester’s data, it looks like it’ll beat the BL by a healthy margin in capacity and supposedly even lower resistance. I fully expect this cell to obsolete everything but the HE2/25R for hot rods above 5-7A and maybe the D1/E1, which then only would have a small teeny tiny niche in the 2-4A and 1-2A ranges (respectively) in efficient buck/boost circuits. The only other cells on the horizon that I feel could fit between the HE2/25R and the MJ1/BL/GA are the Samsung 30Q and LG HG2. I’ve not yet seen any test data on these yet to know though, and I’m waiting on my 30Q to come in from Illumn sometime this week.
I have yet to find the difference in the ncr18650bf and ncr18650bl. I read this about the BF
“The difference between the new BF and the older B model is that this battery includes the chemical ”SiO” or silicon monoxide. In August 2014, the Berkeley National Laboratory found that the addition of SiO can improve the performance of li-ion batteries by up to 20%.”
I assume the BL has the same chemistry because the graphs I’ve seen look very similar.
As far as cycles, I know the data sheet graph on the BF only goes to 300 cycles. The ncr18650b data sheet shows 500 on the cycle count but actual performance at 300 is about the same as the ncr18650bf. The BF is also a gram lighter than the B