Case Study of an Electric Vehicle Battery Thermal Runaway and Online Internal Short-Circuit Detection

A thermal runaway happened in a battery cell of an electric vehicle during driving, and the fire spreads to other batteries in a few minutes. Based on the recorded battery operation data, this letter analyzes the battery thermal runaway process, and identifies the critical time points of fault signals like cell voltages and temperatures, etc., which depict the start and spread of thermal runaway in the battery pack. By tracing back the clues, it is concluded that the cause of the fire is battery internal short circuit (ISC), and battery overcharge is a potential cause of ISC. Then, three different patterns of battery cell voltage abnormalities are compared, including battery external short circuit, ISC, and poor-signal wire connection. A cell voltage difference-based method is proposed to diagnose ISC online, which is simple and reliable to implement in engineering.