Transferring the Incremental Capacity Analysis to Lithium-Sulfur Batteries

Abstract

In order to investigate the battery degradation and to estimate their health, various techniques can be applied. One of them, which is widely used for Lithium-ion batteries, is the incremental capacity analysis (ICA). In this work, we apply the ICA to Lithium-Sulfur batteries, which differ in many aspects from Lithium-ion batteries and possess unique behavior. One of the challenges of applying the ICA to Lithium-Sulfur batteries is the representation of the IC curves, as their voltage profiles are often non-monotonic, resulting in more complex IC curves. The ICA is at first applied to charge and discharge processes at various temperature levels and afterward the technique is applied to a cell undergoing cycling degradation. It is shown that the ageing processes are trackable from the IC curves and it opens a possibility for their utilization for state-of-health estimation.