An Enhanced Electro-Thermal Coupled Model With Lithium Plating Detection for Lithium-Ion Battery at Low Temperatures

Abstract

Lithium plating may occur when lithium-ion batteries are charged at a high current rate and low ambient temperature. As a result, the battery degradation is accelerated and the risk of thermal runaway is increased. Along these lines, an enhanced electro-thermal model was proposed in this work for charging at low temperature values. By considering the battery with a reference electrode, a dual RC model was built. The developed model can predict the anode potential to prevent the lithium plating. The thermal model and absolute state of charge (SOC) were integrated into the battery model to solve the SOC inconsistency caused by the battery temperature rise during the charging process. Then, the proposed electro-thermal model was used to predict the electrical and thermal characteristics of a 50 Ah battery under various charging rates and low ambient temperature values conditions. In addition, the prediction results were validated by the experiment data. The maximum errors of the cathode potential and battery terminal voltage were 0.058 V and 0.154 V, respectively, whereas the maximum cell temperature error was 0.88 °C. Based on the anode prediction electro-thermal coupling model, a segmented heating strategy without lithium plating was proposed to describe the fast battery charging procedure, which can reduce energy consumption by 16.1% and save charging time by nearly 10 minutes compared with the continuous high-power heating mode.