Performance analysis of safety barriers against cascading failures in a battery pack

• Published in: Reliability engineering & system safety Vol. 228; p. 108804
• Main Authors: Xie, Lin, Ustolin, Federico, Lundteigen, Mary Ann, Li, Tian, Liu, Yiliu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Barking Elsevier Ltd 01.12.2022; Elsevier BV
• Subjects: Batteries; Battery Pack; Cascading failure; Cascading failures; Crack propagation; Critical issues; Degradation; Electric vehicles; Failure; Failure (mechanical); Failure propagation; Lithium; Lithium-ion batteries; Lithium-ion battery; Optimization; Outages; Performances analysis; Power sources; Product safety; Propagation; Rechargeable batteries; Reliability analysis; Reliability engineering; Safety; Safety barrier; Safety barriers; Storage systems; Temperature gradients; Thermal barrier; Thermal barriers; Thermal failure; Lithium-ion battery; Reliability analysis; Safety barrier; Cascading failure
• ISSN: 0951-8320; 1879-0836; 1879-0836
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2022.108804

•A systematic approach for analyzing safety barriers in a battery pack.•Investigation on the battery degradation and barriers against cascading failures.•Integration of thermal propagation, thermal simulations, degradation, and reliability analysis. Lithium-ion batteries have been widely employed as the principal power source in electric vehicles and other storage systems. However, some critical issues in a battery pack still exist, such as thermal failures on initial cells that impact the temperatures of the surrounding cells. Such cascading failures may significantly affect battery performance and safety. Thermal barriers, as one kind of safety barrier, are therefore installed to prevent failure propagations. This paper focuses on the situation when the temperature of battery cell increases, but the battery pack still can be used in a degradation mode since the barriers are against cascading failures. An approach is proposed to analyze how the deployment and performance of thermal barriers in a battery pack determine their capabilities against cascading failures. The approach includes thermal propagation models associated with the simulations, degradation models, reliability analysis, and barrier analysis. Its application is illustrated with a practical case study. The battery reliabilities are sensitive to many factors of the barriers, such as temperature differences, failed cells, and performance coefficient. The barriers between parallel cells are found to be more effective in mitigating failure propagation. Such findings can be beneficial for barrier optimization and reliability improvement of battery packs.