Sandia National Laboratories has improved the predictability of lithium-ion battery safety through understanding the common aspects of thermal safety over a diverse range of safety-related measurements. A series of two open-access articles in the Journal of the Electrochemical Society describe recent work funded by the Office of Electricity Energy Storage Program.A model is developed that provides improved predictions based on a diverse range of safety-related measurements available in the literature including a change in the heat-release behavior responsible for more rapid heating at higher temperatures. This accelerated heat release at higher temperatures must be considered for thermal runaway models to yield meaningful predictions of cascading failure scenarios, which are of concern for grid-storage applications as well as for backup power applications and also electric vehicles. The enhanced model yields excellent predictions of laboratory-scale calorimetry measurements from many researchers published over two decades, encompassing graphite samples with material properties spanning the range utilized as negative electrodes in commercial lithium-ion cells.
Full length papers at: http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/165/16/A3878.full.pdf+html; http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/165/16/A3891.full.pdf+html