Lithium ion batteries play an increasing role in everyday life, giving power to handheld devices or being used in stationary storage solutions. Especially for medium or large scale solutions, the latter application confines a huge amount of energy within a small volume; however, increasing the hazard potential far above the common level. Furthermore, as the safety hazards of lithium ion cells have been known for years, impressively shown by several burning cars or laptops, the need for a further enhancement of the safety of these systems is rising. This manuscript presents measurements of the gas emission from lithium ion batteries in case of a malfunction for different scenarios, showing a large variety of species with mostly toxic to highly toxic properties. The measurements were carried out using a combination of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), quadrupole mass spectrometry (QMS), photoacoustic spectroscopy, and chemical analysis. It is shown that the inflammation of a cell can be overcome, also preventing a cascading effect to neighboring cells, but giving rise to worse toxic gas emission. Furthermore, a filtration concept is presented that decreases the concentration of the emitted components significantly and promises filtration below immediately dangerous to life or health (IDLH) equivalent levels.

Femtosecond laser pulses were used for the direct point-by-point inscription of waveguides into the cladding of standard single-mode fibers. Homogeneous S-shaped waveguides have been processed as a bundle of overlapping lines without damaging the surrounding material. Within these structures, FBGs have been successfully inscribed and characterized. A sensor device to measure the bending direction of a fiber was created by two perpendicular inscribed cladding waveguides with FBG. Finally, a complete 3D shape sensor consisting of several bending sensor planes, capable of detecting bending radii even below 2.5 cm is demonstrated.

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Over the last years, battery safety becomes more and more important due to the wide spread of high-capacity lithium ion batteries applied in e.g. consumer electronics and electrical power storages for vehicles or stationary energy storage systems. However, for these types of batteries, malfunctions could be highly dangerous and all aspects of safety issues are not sufficiently considered, yet. Therefore, the improvement of the battery safety behavior is one of the most important issues discussed in actual research projects. In this paper the application of fiber optical sensors for enhanced battery safety is presented. The temperature is one of the most critical parameters indicating a failure of the cell, but even state-to-the-art battery management systems (BMS) are not able to monitor and interpret the distributed temperature field of a total battery storage system sufficiently. Furthermore, the volume expansion of the battery cell, which could be monitored by the strain on the cells' surfaces, is one additional parameter not considered up to now. Both parameters could be simultaneous monitored by fiber optical sensor arrays, consisting of discrete fiber Bragg grating (FBG) elements. The FBG sensors are directly attached on the surface of the cell, recording the temperature as well as the strain distribution highly accurate and close-meshed. Failures and malfunction such as overcharging, gassing, and thermal runaway can be early predicted and avoided to extend the battery lifetime and enhance the operational battery safety. Moreover, battery aging effects lead to variations in the volume change behavior which can be detected additionally. Hence, a battery fully equipped with fiber optical sensor arrays in combination with an appropriate BMS enables a safe and continuous utilization of the energy storage system even under harsh conditions like rapid charging