Cycle life evaluation of lithium cells subjected to micro-cycles

The typical operating condition of storage batteries requires to deliver and absorb small currents in large intervals of time, in order of minutes or hours. However, in the last years lithium batteries are more and more considered in “power oriented” applications in which they are required to manage large currents in short intervals of time, typically few seconds or tens of seconds. Unfortunately, very limited information on the cell life on this kind of usage are available in literature. Indeed, the paper is focused on the evaluation of the aging process for high power lithium batteries subjected to shallow-depth charge/discharge cycles. The aim is to evaluate if the battery life corresponding to such micro-cycles can reach several hundreds of thousands, allowing the hypothesis that battery performance is effectively much better than expected by the analysis of manufacturer data.