Experimental Analysis of Thermal Runaway and Propagation in Lithium-Ion Battery Modules

By C. F. López, J. Jeevarajan, Partha P. Mukherjee. 2015

345 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While the energy and power density of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are steadily improving, thermal safety continues to remain a critical challenge. Under abuse conditions, exothermic reactions may lead to the release of heat that can trigger subsequent unsafe reactions. The situation worsens in a module configuration, as the released heat from an abused cell can activate a chain of reactions in the neighboring cells, causing catastrophic thermal runaway. This work focuses on experimental elucidation and analysis of different LIB module configurations to characterize the thermal behavior and determine safe practices. The abuse test consists of a heat-to-vent setting where a single cell in a module is triggered into thermal runaway via a heating element. The cell-to-cell thermal runaway propagation behavior has been characterized. Results have shown that increasing the inter-cell spacing in a module containing cylindrical cells significantly decreases the probability of thermal runaway propagation. Additionally, it was determined that appropriate tab configuration combined with cell form factors exhibit a major influence on thermal runaway propagation. Different thermal insulation materials have been analyzed to determine their ability to ameliorate and/or potentially mitigate propagation effects. © The Author(s) 2015. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 License (CC BY-NC-ND, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is not changed in any way and is properly cited. For permission for commercial reuse, please email: oa@electrochem.org. [DOI: 10.1149/2.0921509jes] All rights reserved.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73a9ed1d13eff5d820cacf9987000e2c0ccb7356

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Citations in the corpus

A Review on the Thermal Hazards of the Lithium-Ion Battery and the Corresponding Countermeasures (2019, background): “[126], it was revealed that a branched style of tabbing as shown in Figure 7 improved the voltage retention as well as the safety of the pack over a serpentine style of tabbing as the shorted trigger battery was electrically better isolated from the rest of the pack when the tabs were branched.”
Li-Ion Battery Fire Hazards and Safety Strategies (2018, background): “Enlarging the space between cells in a battery pack can decrease the probability of thermal runaway propagation [23].”