During the design phase of a battery powered product, engineers will need to qualify cells for suitability in the application. While often this testing will be done with dedicated cell test equipment, sometimes engineers will turn to standard off-the-shelf power supplies to charge the cells and standard off-the-shelf electronic loads to discharge the cells. This standard power test equipment is easily found in R&D labs and can be more flexible than dedicated cell testers because you can program standard power supplies and e-loads to provide a wide variety charging and discharging profiles to meet the specific needs of the application.