The electro-thermal behaviors of the lithium-ion batteries corroded by the salt spray environment

Abstract

Although the application of lithium-ion batteries in the marine environment such as electric ships and other energy storage equipment, has gradually flourished in recent years, the effect of the special salt spray environment on the cells has not been carefully revealed since it may pose a corrosive threat to the metallized cells. In this paper, the electrochemical performance, aging mechanism, and thermal behavior of the cells after subjecting to different salt spray times are investigated experimentally. The results show that the corrosion morphology of cells is increasingly serious with the salt spray time, destroying the internal structure of the battery and accelerating its aging. The capacity decay mechanism is mainly due to the loss of active material (LAM), while the contribution of the loss of available lithium inventory (LLI) gradually increases and tends to prevail upon the former as the corrosion time prolongs. Findings also show both a larger state of charge and longer salt spray time will result in a much higher battery temperature during the cycling process. The maximum temperature of LIBs with 100 % SOC and salt spray time of 40 h reaches 36.23 °C during the 50th cycle, while that for 0 % SOC is only 30.56 °C. Therefore, the corroded cells age faster, generates more heat, exhibits worse safety performance, and is more likely to cause thermal runaway and other safety issues than the normal ones.