Overview
Batteries are increasingly relied upon to provide multiple services during applications
(e.g. traction in an electric vehicle, vehicle-to-grid, ancillary services) and to
act as the ultimate resiliency element (e.g. electric vehicles used as power units
during Hurricane Sandy). However, the ability to perform these diverse services is
compromised by battery aging phenomena that eventually lead to failure. Understanding
of how service conditions and context affect battery aging is limited due to a) battery
high context dependency on generation and load dynamics, and environmental conditions;
b) the multi-scale cell and module nature of battery systems; and c) the fact that
a battery itself varies with age, as batteries are repurposed after a first life (e.g.
electric vehicle) into a second life (e.g. grid or residential).
This CAREER project aims to understand battery aging dynamics as context-dependent,
and to provide a unified theory that links application-level events and conditions
with cell- and module-level aging events. The Pl hypothesizes that a battery electrochemical
nature and aging, multi-scale system, observability challenges, and its context-dependency
can all be modeled using ecological tools, with ecology defined as a branch of biology
that explores organism relationships to one another and to their environment. Therefore,
methods proven useful to study ecological relationships are well suited to study battery
life, and can provide new knowledge, testing and estimation techniques. This project
draws from two pertinent areas in ecology: 1) multi-scale field testing and 2) modeling
of interrelationships among ecosystem elements to understand coupled effects and improve
remaining life predictions. Hence, the research objectives are: 1 ) Identify a battery
context and its observability through sensors and data in real deployment conditions
for two lives (electric vehicle and grid); 2) Optimize a methodology to translate
real-life conditions into the laboratory; 3) Design a large multi-scale testing platform
in the laboratory for new and aged cells and modules that mimics real-life conditions;
4) Explore multi-scale battery dynamics and aging by developing reasoning networks
that capture the whole battery context variations throughout its scales, reaching
the application level; develop theories that link these networks across lives; design
battery management systems that can learn to construct and apply these networks to
improve their decision making and prediction.
Intellectual Merit
This novel project will provide knowledge and perspectives to two fields by capitalizing
upon the similarities between battery context-dependencies, battery life, and ecological
systems. This new outlook will provide a unified theory for testing, estimation and
management of batteries across cell, module, pack, and application scales and life
scales in a research field that up to this point has been disconnected between scales.
Testing approaches, interrelationship models, and estimation methods used in ecology
are predicted to improve upon present, state-of-the-art battery research methods to
provide economic, resiliency and environmental benefits by better understanding and
leveraging the unique, time-dependent relationships each battery has with its context.
Broader Impacts
This work will benefit all battery portable, transportation, and grid applications
as well as multiple sectors. It will include the emerging battery repurposing sector,
by providing tangible methods to improve testing, estimation and management techniques.
The result will be longer battery life, better performance, and less environmental
waste. Educational impacts include active learning opportunities for undergraduate
and graduate students via research and educational interactions with individualized
testing boards linked to the newly created large multi-scale testing platform. This
strategy will enable low cost, highly distributed testing environments. The Pl will
disseminate tools via national education conferences to improve the nearly nonexistent
battery testing training of students. This project will facilitate new paths in multi-disciplinary
graduate courses. The Pl has a passion to increase representation of Hispanic females
in STEM. Outreach will include hosting 4 diverse Community College students for summer
research through the Michigan College and University Partnership, and participating
in Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers conferences, specifically in the female
Hispanic track.
