Lithium-ion Battery Modeling and Simulation for Aging Analysis using PyBaMM

Abstract: The rate of degradation of a lithium-ion battery depends on its use i.e. how it is charged and discharged. Physics-based models are used to represent the processes inside a cell as well as the degradation mechanisms. This thesis aimed to compare how the battery lifetime is affected when charging with different charging protocols using different battery models and degradation mechanisms. The investigated models are the Single Particle Model (SPM), the Single Particle Model with electrolyte (SPMe), and the Doyle-Fuller Newman model (DFN). The degradation mechanisms are solid electrolyte interphase (SEI), and lithium plating (LP). The used charging protocols are constant-current constant voltage(CCCV), positive pulsed current (PPC), and constant current (CC). Pulsed charging was included to investigate if the battery lifetime can be improved as in an experiment by Huang where pulsed charging increased the battery lifetime by 60%. To perform the simulations using the physics-based models, PyBaMM (PythonBattery Mathematical Modeling) was used. The simulations were performed for a lithium cobalt oxide (LCO) cell. Two types of SEI were implemented, solvent-diffusion limited and reaction limited. For the LP only irreversible LP was used.1200 cycles were simulated. Comparing the PPC and CC protocols, there were no significant changes between the degradation mechanisms for the different protocols. The results were the same for all the models, except for the results of the internal resistance. The conclusion is that for the PPC and CC protocols, the cell degrades the same although the PPC protocol used twice the C-rate. The PPC charging did not increase the battery lifetime. For the CCCV and CC protocols, there were some bigger differences between the protocols, but between the different models, there weren’t any significant differences. The CCCV degrades the cell faster for all degradation mechanisms and all models. Simulating one degradation submodel at a time resulted in a very small capacity fade for some submodels. Therefore, for future work, it is suggested to use several degradation submodels at the same time but also to try other degradation mechanisms or try PPC protocols with different frequencies and duty cycles.