A broad review on the safety of aged lithium-ion batteries

Concerns about the safety of lithium-ion batteries have motivated numerous studies on the response of fresh cells to abusive, off-nominal conditions, but studies on aged cells are relatively rare. This talk reviews all open literature on the thermal, electrical, and mechanical abuse response of aged lithium-ion cells and modules to identify critical changes in their behavior relative to fresh cells. We outline data gaps in aged cell safety, including electrical and mechanical testing, and module-level experiments. Understanding how the abuse response of aged cells differs from fresh cells will enable the design of more effective energy storage failure mitigation systems.

Judy Jeevarajan is vice-president and executive director of the Electrochemical Safety Research Institute (ESRI) at UL Research Institutes (formerly Underwriters Laboratories, Inc.). She has worked in the field of batteries for more than 25 years, with a primary focus on lithium-ion chemistry.

Jeevarajan serves in the technical working groups and committees for standards organizations such as UL, Society of Automotive Engineers, International Civil Aviation Organization/Society of Aerospace Engineers, Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics, International Electrotechnical Commission, and American National Standards Institute. She currently leads an effort under the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics to develop a space safety standard for battery systems. She also serves as a member of the Informal Working Group and Dangerous Goods Panel under the United Nations. Jeevarajan is a member of the Great Lakes Energy Institute Advisory Board at Case Western Reserve University.

Before joining Underwriters Laboratories Inc., she worked for NASA at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston for 12 years, serving as group lead for Battery Safety and Advanced Technology. Prior to becoming a civil servant at NASA, Jeevarajan worked onsite for five and a half years at NASA-JSC for Lockheed Martin Space Operations.

Jeevarajan earned an MS in chemistry from the University of Notre Dame and PhD in chemistry (electrochemistry) from the University of Alabama. She has won numerous NASA awards, including the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and the NASA-NESC Engineering Excellence Award. She also received the 2019 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Aerospace Power Systems Award, and India Energy Storage Alliance Woman Leader of the Year 2020–Energy Storage Systems Award.

Yuliya Preger is a senior member of technical staff in the Energy Storage Technology and Systems Group at Sandia National Labs. She has served as the principal investigator for multiple projects funded by the Department of Energy on the safety and reliability of grid energy storage systems. Her research interests include battery cell level degradation and abuse response, application of power electronics to energy storage safety, using battery data for improved energy storage modeling, and system level energy storage safety. She is co-founder of batteryarchive.org, the first public repository for easy visualization and comparison of battery degradation data across institutions.