(Invited) Challenges for Accelerating Life Testing of Commercial Lithium-Ion Batteries

Life testing of commercial lithium-ion batteries is critical for predicting lifetime, anticipating failure, and guaranteeing safe operation of real-world battery energy storage systems. The traditional method for conducting life testing is to use accelerated aging experiments, where stress factors such as temperature, charge/discharge rate, or daily charge-throughput are pushed to extremes to drive cell failure, while taking care not to induce degradation mechanisms that do not reflect real-world use. But even ‘accelerated’ aging tests generally require 6 months to several years of testing to reach end-of-life for the current generation of mass-produced lithium-ion batteries. So, many efforts have been made to accelerate ‘accelerated aging’ of commercial cells throughout the battery community. But it is critical to ensure that the results of invasive or novel accelerated life testing experiments match well with not only changes to the electrochemical performance of traditionally aged cells, but also that the impacts of physical or chemical degradation mechanisms are also well characterized. This work compares the results of a 2-year accelerated aging test conducted on 23 commercial large-format NMC-Gr cells with a variety of other accelerated life testing experiments. Coin-cell experiments using both full-cell and symmetric-cell configurations were used to study the microstructural changes and electrochemical behavior of both NMC and graphite electrodes, with the small format allowing for destructive characterization of many test replicates throughout cell lifetime; these experiments can be conducted more quickly than their large-format counterparts, and enable more detailed understanding of the degradation trajectory than the large-format test. However, difficulties in transferring electrochemical trends from the coin-cell format to the large-format cell will be discussed. In addition, cascading failure mechanisms observed in the large-format cells may not occur in coin-cells due to differences in the mechanical and thermal environment of each system. Implications for the design of small-format accelerated life testing using electrodes harvested from commercial batteries will be discussed. Calendar aging was accelerated by monitoring daily self-discharge and quantifying both reversible and irreversible capacity losses; challenges for making quantitative predictions from short-term calendar aging tests will be presented.