Space Battery Safety and Reliability

Spacecraft electrical power subsystem (EPS) requirements such as bus voltage, charge management, fault tolerance, operating temperature, and mission duty power loading have a significant impact on battery safety and reliability. Lithium‐ion batteries (LIBs) lacking the proper thermal, mechanical, and electrical safety hazard controls may be at risk to meet mission specified safety requirements. Recent industry experience has shown that cell‐to‐cell propagating thermal runaway (TR) may be the most catastrophic hazard facing LIB technologies. As such, the use of LIB‐based EPS presents a unique set of engineering challenges to identifying failure causes and hazard controls for verifying safety margins. This chapter describes human‐rated spacecraft LIB design features in crewed missions that mitigate safety risk in space‐qualified LIB power systems. LIB reliability is discussed in terms of estimating the likelihood of the LIB meeting performance requirements for the specified mission lifetime.