Lithium-Ion Capacitor Safety Testing for Commercial Application

Abstract

The lithium-ion capacitor (LIC) is a recent innovation in the area of electrochemical energy storage that hybridizes lithium-ion battery anode material and an electrochemical double layer capacitor cathode material as its electrodes. The high power compared to batteries and higher energy compared to capacitors has made it a promising energy-storage device for powering hand-held and portable electronic systems/consumer electronics, hybrid electric vehicles, and electric vehicles. The swelling and gassing of the LIC when subjected to abuse conditions is still a critical issue concerning the safe application in power electronics and commercial devices. However, it is imperative to carry out a thorough investigation that characterizes the safe operation of LICs. We investigated and studied the safety of LIC for commercial applications, by conducting a comprehensive abuse tests on LIC 200 F pouch cells with voltage range from 3.8 V to 2.2 V manufactured by General Capacitors LLC. The abuse tests include overcharge, external short circuit, crush (flat metal plate and blunt indentation), nail penetration test, and external heat test.

Observations on Arrhenius Degradation of Lithium-Ion Capacitors

“…Trend lines were extrapolated from the foiled data, as shown in Figure 2. The trendlines revealed the following Arrhenius relationships, which meet the form of Equation 15, where capacitance (c) is expressed as a percentage (15) and (17) are met.…”

“…Using Langmuir coefficients to study cycle life degradation may be a promising approach. In catastrophic failures both gassing and dendrites have been observed [15]. Also, gassing appears to be a sign of de-…”

Batteries and Supercapacitors Aging

“…Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: In response to this call of papers, 12 research papers [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] and one review article [13] from seven different countries have been published. Researchers from academic institutions from France [1,[3][4][5][6][7]9], Germany [2,9,10,12,13], United States [8,11], Russia [4], Spain [9], Belgium [9] and Ethiopia [13] participated, sometimes in collaboration with industrial partners of energy or automotive sectors.…”

“…The dominant energy storage technology treated in this special issue is without a doubt lithium-ion batteries [1,2,[4][5][6][7][8][9][10]13]. However, other technologies are of interest as for example supercapacitors [2] or NiCd batteries [12] and the emerging technology of Lithium-ion capacitors [3,11].…”

“…Experiments are a very important part of ESS aging studies and most of the papers in this Special Issue included experimental results [2,3,[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Among the different experimental techniques used to measure and detect aging mechanisms taking place in ESS, special attention can be given to Impedance Spectroscopy [2,10,12] and Incremental Capacity [6][7][8] techniques.…”