Battery Thermal Runaway – in general, thermal runaway can be attributed to 3 main types of abuse conditions; mechanical, electrical and thermal. The likelihood of each of these potential risks varies depending on chemistry, design and operating conditions, with the likelihood of failure generally becoming higher with battery aging.
Thermal runaway threshold considerations for various battery application and abuse types are summarized. Thermal runaway of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) remains a major concern in their large-scale applications. It has been a hot topic to understand the thermal runaway (TR) behavior of LIBs, with the goal of achieving early warning of TR.
– Each cell triggers into thermal runaway if top of cell casing > 180degC – This causes the entire pack to go into thermal runaway • As each additional cell goes into thermal runaway, the remaining live cells must carry more current, causing more stress on the given cells, further exacerbating the phenomena
However, as a check of the rule of thumb it shows that the energy released in Thermal Runaway is 2x the electrical energy stored in the cell. This plot shows the bottom end of the data with cells up to around 20Ah.
Richard MN, Dahn JR. Predicting electrical and thermal abuse behaviours of practical lithium-ion cells from accelerating rate calorimeter studies on small samples in electrolyte. J Power Sources. 1999;79:135–42. Wang Q, Ping P, Zhao X, Chu G, Sun J, Chen C. Thermal runaway caused fire and explosion of lithium ion battery.
Phase change materials have gained attention in battery thermal management due to their high thermal energy storage capacity and ability to maintain near-constant temperatures during phase change. By absorbing or releasing latent heat, PCMs offer a promising solution for managing heat in lithium-ion batteries.