Generative learning assisted state-of-health estimation for sustainable battery recycling with random retirement conditions

Rapid and accurate state of health (SOH) estimation of retired batteries is a crucial pretreatment for reuse and recycling. However, data-driven methods require exhaustive data curation under random SOH and state of charge (SOC) retirement conditions. Here, we show that the generative learning-assisted SOH estimation is promising in alleviating data scarcity and heterogeneity challenges, validated through a pulse injection dataset of 2700 retired lithium-ion battery samples, covering 3 cathode material types, 3 physical formats, 4 capacity designs, and 4 historical usages with 10 SOC levels. Using generated data, a regressor realizes accurate SOH estimations, with mean absolute percentage errors below 6% under unseen SOC. We predict that assuming uniform deployment of the proposed technique, this would save 4.9 billion USD in electricity costs and 35.8 billion kg CO2 emissions by mitigating data curation costs for a 2030 worldwide battery retirement scenario. This paper highlights exploiting limited data for exploring extended data space using generative methods, given data can be time-consuming, expensive, and polluting to retrieve for many estimation and predictive tasks. Data scarcity and heterogeneity impede the estimation of retired battery capacity. Here, Tao et al. propose a generative learning method that extends measured data space, potentially reducing curation time, cost and facilitating their sustainable reuse and recycling.