Modelling of thermal events in Lithium-ion batteries

Paper in proceeding, 2015

Lithium-ion batteries are seen as part of the solution to meet the environmental concerns for many areas including the automotive sector. The Li-ion technology has many good properties such as a high energy-density but also drawbacks such as its narrow window of stable operation. If the cell is e.g. heated up it might go into a thermal runaway in which the cell rapidly heats itself up, a process that might spread also to adjacent cells. In order to investigate whether a thermal event will progress to adjacent cells, it is important to be able to model the heat transport within a battery module properly. A first attempt to model the spreading has been made using Comsol Multiphysics for a test case where one cell is exposed to a heating source and then the heating spreads to other cells.