Modelling of thermal runaway propagation in lithium-ion battery packs

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are widely used in many applications, such as the customer electronics, electrifying transport and energy storage systems. However, despite endeavour and progresses, the number of incidents and recalls related to LIBs are far rising.

Abuse operations can result in heat accumulation and consequent thermal reactions inducing failure and thermal runaway (TR), followed by fires and explosions. The TR of one single cell in a pack can trigger a reactions chain in adjacent cells. As a result, TR propagation will occur in the battery packs.

The TR propagation initializing from single cell companied with the reactions chain can activate the TR of entire LIB packs and surroundings, resulting in catastrophic fire and explosion incidents.

The proposed research aims to develop and validate a predictive tool for TR propagation in LIB packs based on LibFOAM the single cell TR model developed by the host and FireFOAM, the fire simulation solver of open source CFD code OpenFOAM.

The following specific research objectives are set towards achieving this goal: Calibrate LibFOAM for predicting the onset of TR in a single cell under different failure modes and establish the key influencing parameters; Extend LibFOAM by coupling it with FireFOAM to predict the release of gases prior to and fol-lowing TR initiation in the triggering cell as well as the subsequent ignition and combustion of the released gases to obtain the resulting thermal environment within the cell groups;Further extend LibFOAM to predict TR propagation in battery modules and packs; Validated the extended LibFOAM with experimental data in the literature and data to be generat-ed by the ERs home institution as well as proprietary data from the UK Health and Safety Exec-utive (HSE) in an ongoing collaborative project; and Use the validated LibFOAM to investigate the effects of different mitigation measures to inhibit TR propagation.