Temperature, Ageing and Thermal Management of Lithium-Ion Batteries

Lena Spitthoff,Odne Stokke Burheim,Paul R Shearing

doi:10.3390/en14051248

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.

Highlights

The current efforts of transitioning from fossil fuels and traditional energy sources to renewable energy sources have led to a massive increase in the lithium-ion battery (LIB) market
As temperature and charging rates are important, these ageing effects were compared in the light of a sufficiently simplified thermal battery model
It appeared that the size of the nominal capacity and geometry does not impact the degradation behavior during cycling as much as electrode material composition, with the cathode material being more important than the anode material for all anodes without silicon

Summary

Introduction

The current efforts of transitioning from fossil fuels and traditional energy sources to renewable energy sources have led to a massive increase in the lithium-ion battery (LIB) market. LIBs have become the leading energy storage technology in many sectors due to their high gravimetric and volumetric energy density, high power density, high efficiency, low self-discharge property and compatibility with the existing electric infrastructure [1]. For the successful application of LIBs in these market segments, high energy, high power and fast charging rates are required; this is typically associated with large amounts of heat being generated and non-uniform current distribution. This in turn leads to safety problems, decreased performance and long term durability challenges, as reaction rates and diffusivity are temperature dependent. Apart from reversible heat, generated heat is an indicator of lost work during energy conversion during the charging and discharging process

Results

Discussion

Conclusion