Process Safety Modelling of Thermal Stability and Scale-Up of Lithium-Ion Batteries

In the UK, the energy storage systems market is growing, and the latest designs are tackling many problems such as sustainability or providing secure and affordable energy for UK Citizens. One such area the government has outlined is to invest in the manufacturing of electric vehicles and infrastructure to support this goal.

The battery currently used for energy storage and electric vehicles is the lithium-ion battery. Though great leaps in improving these batteries' energy capacity and efficiency, most of these systems are manufactured from materials with high energy capacitance and, therefore, have a high possibility of thermal runaway during the manufacturing process or product life cycle. Understanding the thermal runaway propagation during an initiating event could be used by manufacturers to design better safety systems, provide detail on dispersion and details on thermal explosion providing more information to facility engineers, firefighters, and safety regulators.
This research aims to develop a scalable model that simulates the thermal runaway propagation of lithium-ion batteries and can be used to understand and improve safety measures. The following objectives will accomplish this aim:
• Developing a fundamental model for heat transfer throughout a cell-based on literature data
• Couple the thermal distribution model with venting and gasification in the cell, including a sensitivity analysis on gas-phase reactions
• Extend the model using different geometries and scale up by increasing the number of cells to model thermal runaway propagation
• Couple venting, dispersion and thermal propagation on a large scale, i.e. throughout a module, module to module and then a pack

The aim of this project is to develop a scalable, multiphysics model that simulates the thermal runaway of Lithium-ion batteries that can be used to understand and improve safety measures.