Change of safety by main aging mechanism – A multi-sensor accelerating rate calorimetry study with commercial Li-ion pouch cells

The safety of Li-ion batteries is the most critical of many important characteristics and must be carefully considered. However, depending on the aging conditions, safety of batteries can change drastically. We had recently introduced ARC-MS as a new tool for safety investigations, which is an updated accelerating rate calorimeter (ARC) combined with a mass spectrometer (MS). Additionally, our ARC-MS setup is equipped by seven more low cost sensors (temperature, voltage, resistance, audio, strain, and transmitted and reflected ultrasound). In this paper, the dependence of safety on the dominant aging mechanism as a function of aging temperature, and state-of-health (SOH) is investigated on the example of 3.3 Ah commercial pouch cells. The ambient temperature during aging has a strong influence on the dominant aging mechanism (Li plating or SEI growth) of this cell as shown by Arrhenius plots of the aging rate and Post-Mortem analyses (ICP-OES, SEM, EDX, Hg porosimetry, STA) of aged cells. Our in-depth evaluation shows that different sensors can provide indications of safety relevant events (onset of swelling, onset of self-heating, cell venting, stable exothermic reactions, separator melting, and thermal runaway) in the cells independently. Combining these low-cost sensors might be a solution for detection of unsafe cells in applications.