Temperature, Ageing and Thermal Management of Lithium-Ion Batteries

Abstract

Heat generation and therefore thermal transport plays a critical role in ensuring performance, ageing and safety for lithium-ion batteries (LIB). Increased battery temperature is the most important ageing accelerator. Understanding and managing temperature and ageing for batteries in operation is thus a multiscale challenge, ranging from the micro/nanoscale within the single material layers to large, integrated LIB packs. This paper includes an extended literature survey of experimental studies on commercial cells investigating the capacity and performance degradation of LIB. It compares the degradation behavior in terms of the influence of operating conditions for different chemistries and cell sizes. A simple thermal model for linking some of these parameters together is presented as well. While the temperature appears to have a large impact on ageing acceleration above room temperature during cycling for all studied cells, the effect of SOC and C rate appear to be rather cell dependent.Through the application of new simulations, it is shown that during cell testing, the actual cell temperature can deviate severely from the reported temperature depending on the thermal management during testing and C rate. It is shown, that the battery lifetime reduction at high C rates can be for large parts due to an increase in temperature especially for high energy cells and poor cooling during cycling studies. Measuring and reporting the actual battery (surface) temperature allow for a proper interpretation of results and transferring results from laboratory experiments to real applications.

Potential and Limitations of Battery-Powered All-Electric Regional Flights—A Norwegian Case Study

“…Another major concern is the thermal runaway in batteries, a cascading, self-feeding exothermic reaction that can cause battery fires [41], [42]. Thermal runaway can be triggered by mechanical abuse (e.g., crushing or penetration), chemical abuse (e.g., over-charging or short-circuiting), or thermal abuse (e.g., excessive external temperatures) [41], [42]. Ongoing research is trying to understand the mechanisms behind thermal runaway in order to propose suited solutions [43].…”

“…Feng et al (2018) discussed some of the thermal runaway mechanisms and proposed a protection concept for thermal runaway [44]. In addition to the thermal runaway issues, elevated temperatures accelerate the formation of a passivizing solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) layer on the electrode surface [41], [42]. The formation of SEI is one of the main aging mechanisms of a Lithium-ion battery, so faster SEI-growth would result in more frequent replacement of the battery and higher maintenance costs.…”

Stationary Battery Thermal Management: Analysis of Active Cooling Designs

“…The goals of thermal management systems, according to the IEEE/ASHRAE handbook for static battery thermal management (BTM), are to enhance performance of the battery while staying under budgetary restrictions and to guarantee optimum safety [27, 28,31,32]. To achieve this goal, novel cooling methods are now being investigated and developed, including passive and free cooling, forced air, liquid cooling, phase change materials, and other ways [25,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. The great bulk of work in creating innovative battery thermal management, on the other hand, are focused on battery packs for electric vehicles [2,45,46].…”

A Review of the Power Battery Thermal Management System with Different Cooling, Heating and Coupling System

“…The temperature has a great impact on battery performance, battery life, and battery safety. When the temperature is too low or too high, the power battery may have thermal runaway, capacity decline, internal resistance increase, life attenuation, and charging and discharging difficulties [3,4]. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a complete, efficient and reliable battery management system to ensure the safety and smooth operation of power batteries.…”