Battery Safety: Recent Advances and Perspective

Dear Colleagues,

Lithium-ion batteries have been subject to indispensable momentum in light of the current mobile society with an increasingly stringent sustainability requirement for energy and the environment. Moreover, many other advanced secondary batteries are under rapid development for future industrial applications, including the Li-metal battery, the solid-state battery, the sodium-ion battery, etc. All these new chemistries have made battery safety a major obstacle for further application and commercialization. This Special Issue will cover the key topics in the research studies on battery safety behavior.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Advanced experimental characterization of the battery safety behaviors;
• Battery safety evaluation and testing protocols;
• Battery internal short circuit mechanisms ;
• Novel modeling of battery safety behaviors
• Innovative design and optimization of battery cell/module/pack for safety purpose;
• Safety issues of next-generation battery chemistries, such as Si-based, Li-metal, and all-solid-state batteries.

This Special Issue also serves as a platform for researchers to report and share the state-of-the-art research results disseminated during the 2024 Battery Safety Workshop held in Columbia, USA in early August 2024.

Dr. Xiang Gao
Dr. Jun Xu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• internal short circuit
• thermal runaway
• thermal runaway propagation
• fire and explosion
• in-situ techniques
• multiphysics modeling
• multiscale modeling
• DFT
• FEA
• safety test protocol
• early warning
• advanced detection
• durability
• safety
• cycling
• high-energy-density
• fast charging
• low temperature
• Li plating and dendrite

Title: Advanced Structure Design to Retard Internal Short Circuit under Mechanical Abusive Loading of Lithium-Ion Battery
Authors: Carlos Butz Monroy; Jun Xu
Affiliation: Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
Abstract: Lithium-ion battery (LIB) as one of the most popular energy storage systems in recent years has attracted more and more research interests, especially the batter safety which is the critical issue during the application. For example, in electric vehicle (EV) field, the crash incident leads to internal short circuit (ISC) and then thermal runaway (TR), which may result in fire and explosion hazards. To address this issue and reduce the risks of battery safety, advanced structure design of the battery module/pack is proposed as one of the most promising strategies. In this study, several convincing advanced structures have been designed and demonstrated by coupling the experimental data and finite element (FE) modeling. These structures have been revealed to retard the ISC during the mechanical abusive loadings caused by car crash or other severe scenarios. This study provides a powerful tool and guidance on battery module structure design.

Title: Effects of the SiO Particle Discrete Distribution on the Battery Impedance
Authors: Xiang Gao; Jun Xu
Affiliation: Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
Abstract: High-energy-density is now one of the critical targets of next-generation lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) to meet the requirements from the rapid development of energy-consuming industries, like electric vehicles (EVs). Si-based anode, as one ultra-high-capacity material, is one of the most promising candidates to achieve the high-energy density functionality, due to its properties of low-cost, abundance, and environmentally friendly. However, the Si-based material (like SiO) is usually applied in the battery by composing with traditional materials (like graphite (Gr)) to address the high volume change during the electrochemical cycling. Such composite structure brings in new complexity both in electrochemical and mechanical aspects. Since the Si proportion in the commercial-level battery application is still limited under 10%, the distribution of SiO particles in the anode layer is in spot-format. This distribution is demonstrated to influence the impedance during cycling in the present study via numerical modeling. The effects of various SiO weight percentages and electrode thickness are discussed as well. This study reveals the underlying mechanism of how SiO distribution regulate the impedance of the battery and provides guidance on Si-based anode design to mitigate the effects of bad impedance condition.

Title: Electrochemical-Mechaincal Coupling Effect from Electrolyte upon Dynamic Loading
Authors: John Sherman; Jun Xu
Affiliation: Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
Abstract: In recent years, many researchers have devoted their efforts into the studies of lithium-ion battery (LIB) topics from many aspects, like electrochemical, electrical, mechanical, thermal, etc. For mechanical aspect, the studies of quasistatic loadings are very mature while the behaviors under dynamic loading of LIBs are still lacking understandings. Both experimental and numerical studies of the LIB under dynamic loadings have been reported frequently recently, however, none of the numerical models proposed in these studies considers the effects of electrolyte. It has been revealed that the dynamic effects are not only from the strain-rate dependent properties of the component materials, but also caused by the dynamic flow of the liquid phase. This requires a fluid-solid coupling study, which is the major work done in the present study. We proposed a fluid-solid coupled model considering the effects of electrolyte flow during the dynamic loading of LIB and validated it by comparing the numerical results with the experimental data. This is the first fluid-solid coupled model to describe the LIB behaviors as far as we know and provides a powerful tool for LIB studies under dynamic scenarios.