Emissions of gases, liquids and solids from Li-ion batteries under various conditions, including battery fire, are outlined. Potential implications on safety of electric vehicles and road infrastructure are discussed.

The Joint Research Centre's battery testing laboratory in Petten, NL assesses battery safety and performance tests also for providing technical evidence for legislative purposes. Technical support includes, e.g., the development of a thermal propagation test procedure for electric vehicle safety or assessment of possible options for evaluation of sustainability of batteries. An overview of JRC's battery testing activities is given and selected findings on battery safety and performance are presented.

Despite various standards available for Electric Vehicle (EV) battery testing, there have been few severe accidents noticed recently which has resulted in some reservations by the EV consumer, hindering the deployment of the EV. Therefore, it is essential to experimentally investigate the speed at which batteries are crushed in an EV to identify its failure behaviour and look into the safety of EV consumer and the need for the harmonisation of multifarious globally available standards.

Monitoring the battery health is important for predicting lifetime and optimising power. Often battery health is gauged by the capacity fade. However, degradation mechanisms of batteries are complex and cannot be sufficiently represented by a single figure of merit. We investigated using differential voltage (DV, dV/dQ) and incremental capacity (IC, dQ/dV) to calculate the extent of losses in lithium inventory (LLI) and active materials (LAM), in anode and cathode. The model provides a time-efficient method for on-board diagnostics with simplified parameterisations.

In Thermal Runaways, gas released from battery cells can lead to catastrophic fires. The presentation will highlight how the release of hot, metallic particles from destroyed cell cans can be captured by function-added venting units, thus preventing ignition. An outlook will be given on future evolution of venting units and Thermal Runaway detection by sensor technology. These solutions are essential to enable passengers to safely exit the car before explosions and fires happen.

As price, quality and carbon footprint are playing an increasingly important role in the future of e-mobility, new kiln concepts are needed to reach these targets. The currently available kilns cannot provide the required performance for the heat treatment of the electrode raw materials (cathode or anode) or even solid-state battery systems.

See how Onejoon’s advanced kiln concepts provide revolutionary improvements in the heat treatment technology of cathode, anode, and solid electrolyte material systems. They help manufacturers to not only improve the quality, but also to reduce production costs by increasing capacity and saving energy and raw materials. You will also get insight on how we use simulations and production intend trials to define a suitable scale up concept for newly developed materials to get from lab to industrial scale production.

Basic monitoring of the BMS is carried out by derived measurements during the validation of battery cells after development. The wide range of customer-specific and geographical usage profiles can only be tested or simulated in advance to a limited extent. For a comprehensive performance or health status, further metrics from the current cell state or effects from tolerable deviations from the target value during production and development are needed.

Knowing the basic characteristics of a cell with just a few current and voltage measurements enables us to answer the fundamental questions of battery system developers. The self-developed empirical equation allows easy determination of the available discharge power of lithium-ion batteries that helps to design and check the suitability as energy storage systems, e.g., for hybrid electric vehicles. Even if all the project- and application-specific parameters are not sufficiently defined, the equation allows a fast and cost-effective feasibility study on technical conditions such as vehicle range.

Valuable customer feedback and intensive cooperation with research institutes were used for further development of INFICON’s ELT3000 leak tester for hard case and pouch lithium ion battery cells. Within this presentation, we will briefly remind the working principle of direct electrolyte leak testing before focusing on the integration of the leak detector into production areas and showing real test data from the field.

MBD applied for efficient development, design & optimization of cooling systems. An innovative 0D/1D model developed to predict two-phase flow separation. Battery temperature is estimated in different conditions.

Cooling batteries effectively is essential for safety, and can improve performance & lifetime, and reduce cost. We will show how most batteries are designed poorly, how a simple measurement the Cell Cooling Coefficient can be used to compare cells, and how cells & packs should be designed in the future. Results from a recent Faraday Institution project on cell design will also be presented.

An automotive battery pack used in electric vehicle (EV) comprises several hundred to a few thousand of individual Lithium-ion (Li-ion) cells when cylindrical cells are used to build the battery pack. These cells are connected in series and/or parallel to deliver the required power and capacity to achieve the designed vehicle driving range. This triggers the need for suitable joining methods capable of providing mechanical strength together with the required electrical and thermal performances.

Integrated charging technology in electric vehicles employs existing motor powertrain components to facilitate level-3 fast battery charging capabilities with reduction in overall weight and cost of the vehicle resulting in improved driving range per charge. This beneficial feature is propelling research and development activities towards designing a high-performing, compact and cost-effective multi-purpose traction motor for integrated charging application.

In order to prevent safety hazards, extensive research is undertaken to determine the causes of thermal runaway, as well as the influencing factors. In the last nine years, we have established battery calorimetry as a versatile characterization technique, which allows advancements for the thermal management and the safety of batteries. The primary purpose of this work was to perform a comprehensive calendaric and cylic ageing study with 116 commercial 18650 cells to determine the correlation between cell aging and the thermal runaway.

The power density of lithium-ion batteries has increased significantly — from 5,000 to more than 10,000 W/Kg per cell — due to demands from the HEV market. 

Given that the internal impedance of the separator affects the battery charge/discharge performance, we will be revealing an eco-friendly patented separator structure which can effectively reduce 10% of DCR and increase battery performance.