Capacity Degradation Assessment of Lithium-Ion Battery Considering Coupling Effects of Calendar and Cycling Aging

Capacity degradation of lithium-ion batteries largely determines the cost, performance and environmental impact of various products such as renewable energy production systems, portable electronics, and electric vehicles. Degradation assessment is thus of great importance for prognostic and health management of batteries, which ensures a stable production and operation. There are typically two leading sources contributing to the degradation of a lithium-ion battery, namely, cycling aging during charge/discharge cycles and calendar aging during idle states. However, most existing studies on degradation assessment either only consider a single source or ignore the coupling of these two sources, which makes the evaluation inefficient. A common observation in practice is that a battery tends to degrade faster when it experiences charge/discharge cycles continuously for a longer time. To capture this feature, this paper introduces the concept of the cumulative uninterrupted cycling duration (CUCD), which is defined as the consecutive operation duration since a battery ends the idle state. The CUCD can also help to model the coupling between the calendar and cycling aging. This paper then proposes to model the drift rate of cycling aging as a function of the CUCD and the functional form is determined with the monotonic spline. We estimate the model parameters by maximizing the likelihood function. Hypothesis testings toward the significance of the coupling between two aging sources and the monotonicity of the drift rate function under cycling aging are also provided. The effectiveness and the superiority of the model are validated using numerical and real case studies.
Note to Practitioners
—This study aims to characterize the degradation of lithium-ion battery simultaneously considering calendar and cycling agings and the coupling effect. Unlike previous research that only supplied experimental results to qualitatively illustrate the existence of the coupling effect between these two aging sources, this study provides procedures to quantitatively test the significance of such an effect. In addition, previous research ignored the coupling effect in the degradation modeling as it is difficult to capture, this study propose the concept of CUCD to characterize it. The CUCD is also introduced as a stress factor for cycling aging, which is based on the fact that a battery will degrade faster when it experiences charge/discharge cycle continuously for a longer time. Hypothesis testing is also provided to illustrate this monotonicity. To deal with another challenge that the expert knowledge of the functional form between cycling aging and CUCD is unavailable except for the monotonicity, a nonparametric method with the shape-restricted spline is adapted. The estimation procedures for the model parameters are also presented.