There are two ways to build a battery patent portfolio. One is to claim the chemistry — the oxides, the electrolytes, the electrode coatings. The other is to claim the conditions the cell runs under: how it is cooled, how it is charged, how it is warmed in the cold, how a degraded pack is swapped out. Honda Motor's batch of patents that issued on May 12, 2026, leans hard toward the second. Read as a set, the grants map coverage of the operating envelope of a pack — the part of the system that, in practice, determines how long the cells inside actually last.

Thermal management anchors the cluster. US12626972B2 claims a heat exchanger for cooling battery cells built from interleaved first and second heat-exchange plates, each with its own water jacket and supply geometry. Heat is the single largest driver of cell aging outside of the chemistry itself, and a granted claim on a specific plate-and-jacket cooling architecture is enforceable coverage on how a pack sheds that heat. The patent carries a stack of H01M 10/65xx CPC tags — the sub-class for battery cooling — confirming where the claim sits.

The cold end of the temperature range is covered too. US12626967B2 claims a temperature-raising device that places a capacitor in parallel with the battery and drives it with an alternating-current circuit tuned to the cell's inductance and resistance, warming the pack in cold conditions where lithium-ion performance drops. Together with the cooling patent, the two grants bracket both ends of the thermal problem.

Watching and controlling the charge

The most unusual record in the set looks at the cell from the inside. US12627166B2 claims a charge/discharge control system that places an image acquirer inside a liquid battery to capture images of the cell interior, transfers that image data, and controls charging based on it. The patent states the rationale plainly.

The present invention is to provide a charge/discharge control system and a charge/discharge control method capable of performing, in real time, highly accurate analysis of an internal state of a battery that is actually operating in a vehicle, and capable of performing control on the battery with a high accuracy based on the analysis, for improvement of safety.— Charge/discharge control system and charge/discharge control method, US12627166B2

Whatever the engineering merits, the claim establishes coverage on a method — internal optical sensing tied to charge control — that is distinct from the conventional voltage-and-current battery-management approach. It is a bounded claim on a specific technique, not a general patent on monitoring a battery.

The electrode, the swap, and the grid

A single chemistry-side grant rounds out the electrode coverage: US12626906B2 claims a positive electrode and electricity-storage device in which the electrode's peak pore diameter is held smaller than the median diameter of the dielectric particles in the mix — a construction claim tagged H01M 4/364 and 10/0525. Two further grants extend Honda's coverage past the individual pack. US12626981B2 claims a battery-replacement machine with a turnable tray for holding and swapping a mobile battery — the hardware of a battery-swap model. And US12623569B2 claims a system that selects which vehicle's battery to use for power transfer to or from the grid, based on each driver's scheduled driving and driving characteristics — vehicle-to-grid coverage tagged B60L 55/00.

The through-line is operating conditions, not chemistry. Cooling, heating, charge control, swapping, grid discharge — these are the levers that govern a pack's working life and its second-life value once it leaves the vehicle. Honda's same-day cluster of battery-relevant grants placed it among the active automotive filers for the week, though well behind the cell-maker volume leaders; a sweep of the week's lithium-mentioning grants shows CATL, SK On, and LG Energy Solution each carrying larger counts. What Honda's batch establishes is a different kind of footprint: issued claims concentrated on the management of the pack rather than the makeup of the cell. The records also reach into Honda's parallel fuel-cell work — several grants the same day cover fuel-cell stacks and systems — but the storage-side cluster reads as a coherent map of pack operating-condition coverage.