Laying the foundations for battery management system improvements
To operate batteries safely and effectively, battery failure needs to be predicted ahead of time. However, this is a very difficult problem, because batteries are complex devices, containing many different materials working together, so there are many unexpected interactions between the component materials that could lead to a breakdown in the structure and function of the battery.
In a real battery, many of these degradation processes could be operating at the same time but until recently, research has focused on understanding the processes individually. The Multi-scale Modelling project has been developing models to simulate a range of degradation processes and has now combined them into one model, so that the effects of many degradation processes and how they interact can be simulated. This brings researchers much closer to being able to predict how the battery will fail ahead of time, laying the foundations for battery management systems to intervene and prevent failure during use
Image: Cylindrical cell geometry discretisation example in 2D (approx. 2000 modelling cells). Each finite volume is simulated as an individual Newman model.
Case study published December 2022.