3D Electrothermal Model for Internal Temperature Distribution in Lithium-Ion Battery Cell and Module

Abstract

In recent years, lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have been massively developed in many applications as they provide high energy and power densities, high efficiency and long lifespan compared to other battery technologies. Despite remarkable improvements, Li-ion batteries still face thermal issues, which cause performance drop, limited calendar life, safety concerns and temperature-caused degradation. Therefore, proper thermal management for a LIB is necessary to control its temperature and to extend its lifetime. Internal temperature measurement remains very challenging for LIB. So, electrothermal LIB models, developed to forecast both electrical performances and temperature distributions, seems to be a powerful and complementary tool to experiments, in particular to obtain battery temperatures in use. Most of models, assume simplified approach considering that heat sources are either located in the center of the cell or uniformly distributed in the volume of the cell and so do not consider the real internal geometry of the cells.In this work, a 3D electrothermal model of a large commercial prismatic NMC-type lithium-ion cell (25 Ah) is developed based on the internal geometry reconstructed from tomography. The electrothermal model, developed with the COMSOL Multiphysics® software with the real internal geometry as well as the anisotropy of the thermal properties, accounts for irreversible and reversible heat sources. The entropy variation profiles were estimated by Entroview™ using their patented method. The validation of the model is performed thank to temperature measurement during charge and discharge at several currents in a climatic chamber at 25°C. Simulation results highlight exothermal and endothermal behaviors related to the entropy change along with the charge and discharge stages. Moreover, the internal temperature distribution is thoroughly impacted by the internal geometry of the cell and the anisotropy of the thermal properties.Finally, the 3D electrothermal model is extended to a module of 12 cells in series (12S) to evaluate the heterogeneities of internal temperatures considering the real geometry of each cell. Once validated, simulation (as shown of figure 1) underline the heterogeneous temperature distribution at the module scale and the importance of having an efficient battery thermal management system to limit an excessive increase of the temperatures which can cause performance drops until irreversible degradations. Figure 1