Analysis of Lithium-Ion Battery Failure and PyBaMM's Viability in Simulating Them

As renewable energy sources become more popular, methods of energy storage, especially lithiumion batteries, have become essential in making renewable energy practical. Lithiumion batteries have seen widespread use in everyday machines such as smartphones and electric vehicles, mainly due to their power density and price. Despite their merits, lithium-ion batteries also have significant safety concerns, demonstrated by the several instances of these batteries catching fire or exploding. To ensure future battery safety, it is imperative to develop accurate testing procedures and determine the factors leading to catastrophic failure. The Oxford Mathematical Modelling Battery Group's Python Battery Mathematical Model (PyBaMM) was used to simulate these batteries in action along with experimental data from Dr. Thomas Hodson's lab at Columbia University [1]. By comparing these different types of data and exploring each individually, it was determined that discharge rate and repeated cycling are the leading causes of thermal runaway in lithiumion batteries. It was also determined that PyBaMM, despite showing general trends of different factors that led to combustion, was unviable in the simulation of battery explosions due to its failure to recognize explosive battery temperatures and inability to simulate both realistic thermal behavior and heat exchange between cells and the surrounding environment.