Investigation and Application of Safety Parameters for Lithium-ion Battery Systems

Sammanfattning: The Swedish Armed Forces are investigating high-risk applications where lithium-ion batteries (LIB) can replace traditional lead-acid batteries. Understanding the potential safety risks and evaluating a battery's instability is crucial for military applications. This report aimed to identify critical safety parameters (temperature, potential, and impedance) in commercial batteries with NMC and LFP electrode chemistries, and to investigate how surrounding cells are affected when a battery suffers from thermal runaway (TR) in a battery module developed by FOI. Accelerated rate calorimetry (ARC) experiments on NMC-based Samsung SDI INR21700-40T and INR21700-50E and LFP-based A123 Systems ANR26650m1-B batteries were conducted to identify critical onset conditions of TR. ARC experiments were conducted with continuous electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements to correlate thermal behavior with electrochemical changes in the cell impedance and voltage. The NMC-based batteries showed a distinct endothermic reaction between 116 °C and 121 °C, an onset temperature of exothermic self-heating at around 120 °C, which progressed to an explosive decomposition at about 170 °C and resulted in an adiabatic temperature rise of 250 °C to 290 °C. A significant increase in the cell’s impedance at around 100 °C indicated that the current interrupt device (CID) was triggered due to gas formation and critical pressure build-up within the cell. The LFP-based battery demonstrated improved thermal stability during ARC measurements and did not suffer from TR when heated to 300 °C. Thermal runaway propagation experiments were conducted in a battery module developed by FOI. The identified onset temperatures and electrochemical markers were then used to evaluate the stability of the module cells. Cell temperature increases between 16 °C and 48 °C was observed in cells directly adjacent to the trigger cell. Cells further from the trigger cell experienced uniform temperature increases of between 8 °C and 30 °C. EIS measurements of the module cells revealed no significant changes in their impedance spectra. The insulating polymer wrap around each cell was found to be crucial in preventing TR propagation. TR propagated from cell-to-cell in the module when the insulating wraps were removed, and cells were in direct contact with the thermally conductive heat sink.