Feasibility analysis of second life applications for Li-Ion cells used in electric powertrain using environmental indicators

Abstract

The recently increase of the EV/PHEV market is in part due to the technological progress of battery systems. The energy storage and charging are the critical aspects of an electric vehicle; Li-Ion batteries allow an increase in storage performance and efficiencies despite the needs of a high number of cells. The single Li-Ion cell is constituted by metals, graphite, various salts and electrolytes which result difficult to dispose of or recycle. Therefore the expected environmental sustainability of any EV is limited by the final impact of battery production and disposal. The proposed research studies the Second Life applications suitable for the Li-Ion battery cells used for electric powertrains in order to promote a Sustainable Transportation and avoid the environmental impact that disposal of these batteries would have. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) analysis has been adopted to estimate the gain in terms of environmental impact provided by reusing disposed Li-Ion cells for a Second Life application. An automotive battery pack with LiFePO4 cells has been chosen as a test case, then the life-cycle due to vehicle loads has been predicted by accelerated tests and the residual cell capacity has been experimentally evaluated. A possible Second Life scenario has been studied for the automotive Li-Ion batteries: reusing the disposed cell in a smart grid system after vehicle use to provide the grid energy stabilization and storage. This strategy has been evaluated with an LCA tool taking into account materials (anode, cathode, separator, et.), as well as flows and processes (production, assembly, disassembly) both for production and reuse phases. The research results show a positive effect of the Second Life solution on the environmental impact of the Li-Ion cells; moreover, the collected data will be useful for the Second Life strategies and scheduling during the early design phase.

Second-Life Batteries on a Gas Turbine Power Plant to Provide Area Regulation Services

“…These results do not seem bad when regarding the number of cycles these batteries can do in comparison to the 1000 cycles reported by Ciccioni et al [24], the 1500 cycles on ancillary services from Strickland et al [25], or between 2000 and 1000 full equivalent cycles reported by Muenzel et al [26] on batteries working in the range from 40% to 100% DoD, but they are alarming in terms of days. If batteries should work continuously under exposed load conditions, they will certainly not enter into the market.…”

Optimal Bidding, Scheduling, and Deployment of Battery Systems in California Day-Ahead Energy Market

“…Rather, the focus is on market participation of conventional generators [17], renewable generators [18], and loads [19], [20]. Finally, this paper is also related to the recent studies on reusing secondlife batteries, e.g., see [21], [22]. However, those studies do not discuss optimal bidding and bulk energy market participation.…”

“…More specifically, the real-time market prices are higher when the day-ahead market prices are higher. Given the statistical dependency between the dayahead and the real-time market prices in practice, it is better to use the more realistic solution in (22), see Section IV.…”

Second life of electric vehicle batteries: relation between materials degradation and environmental impact

“…The electric companies are paying special attention to the developments on storage systems providing energy services, such as "area regulation", "transmission and distribution deferral" and "power quality" among others (D. Rastler 2010), (Cready et al 2003), (Ciccioni et al 2012). However, these applications require high power and energy systems that imply the incorporation of hundreds of EV batteries (Heymans et al 2014) that are still not yet available.…”