Yesterday I had a skype discussion with an ex-collegue (a great friend of mine)... He is a LiPo guru and he's working free-lance at LiPol Battery Co in Shenzen this year ..
I was too curious to know why we never took into account the "break-in" effect during test, experiments, life duration, buying cells, driving electronics and so on.
Making the story short, he explained me that "break-in" DOES exist and it is a good practice on post-formation cells (RC multi-cells battery for example), that were shipped with a conservative chemical (vinyl-carbonate) inside the folded cell sheets. This chemical prevent storage degradation of newly charged cells before shipping. In this case break-in is good to start-up a battery, avoiding high current charge and too high temperature, so that chemical is completely eliminated, attaching it to graphite anode. As a result the Z (impedance NOT resistance, measured with elctrochemical impedance spectroscopy) will get lower, because anode is going to be better conductive. As an example, 4-5 times of half or 3/4 normal charge is more than enough.
On the other hand new production process, trimmed on the last 4-5 years,
doesn't use anymore post-formation chemicals to preserve charge. I think (and I hope) P3 battery falls in this second case.
At the end, I think
@silverstoned83 is quite right, in his experience !!
In our experience cells can fail unitl 10 cycle, unfortunately, and they were replaced at a rate of 1% base.
This is a technical datasheet example we receive with battery cells:
https://www.batteryspace.com/prod-specs/ICR18650NH-2200.pdf
In this image I have (
this is new production process study) in my docs, shows what's happening during formation. As you can see as soon as reached 0.15V threshold, impedance of the first cycle and 10th cycle are absolute overlaying. I hope to have clarified a bit.