Investigation on the thermal behavior of Ni-rich NMC lithium ion battery for energy storage

Heat generation is the primary factor for the safety and performance of lithium-ion battery. While the Ni-rich NMC lithium-ion battery has a much worse safety performance compared to other batteries. Hence, it is important to investigate the thermal behavior of the battery. In this paper, a pseudo two dimension (P2D) electrochemical model coupled with 3D lumped thermal model (ECT) was developed to investigate the thermal behavior of large format Ni-rich nickel-cobalt-manganese oxide (NCM) pouch type lithium-ion battery. The charge/discharge performance, heat generation (including total heat generation and polarized/ohmic/reversible heat generation) and temperature rise at different temperatures and different C-rates were numerically investigated to analyze the overall battery performance at the adiabatic condition. The results show that battery can only normally charge/discharge at quite low C-rate at extremely low temperature (−20 °C) with a much high total heat generation (40.02 kJ/36.12 kJ). The total heat generation and temperature rise increase with the decreasing temperature. The highest heat generation and temperature rise occur at the ambient temperature of −5 °C (at the charge rate of 3C) and 0 °C (at the discharge rate of 3C). At low temperatures (<0 °C), the ohmic heat generation mainly contributes to total heat generation, and as the ambient temperature is higher than 5 °C, the polarized heat generation becomes the main heat generation aspect. While the reversible heat generation is relatively small and almost no change at different C-rates.