Fault diagnosis and quantitative analysis of micro-short circuits for lithium-ion batteries in battery packs

Micro-short circuit (MSC) of a lithium-ion battery cell is a potential safety hazard for battery packs. How to identify the cell with MSC in the latent phase before a thermal runaway becomes a difficult problem to solve. We propose a diagnosis method to detect the MSC according to the remaining charging capacity (RCC) variations between cells. When the charging cell voltage curve (CCVC) of the first fully charged cell is regarded as the benchmark, the RCC of each cell can be obtained by the CCVC transformation based on the uniform CCVC hypothesis. The accuracy of the RCC estimation method is validated under constant current and constant power charging experiments. The leakage current of the MSC cell can be obtained by the increase of the RCC after each charge, and it can be converted into the MSC resistance. We set up the battery pack system model with the MSC fault in Simulink® to verify the effectiveness of the method when the battery pack is charged up to different charge cutoff voltages. Through a series of experiments with external resistors, the adaptability of the MSC diagnosis method is further validated for the aged cell, multi-stage charging, and constant power charging.