Hotspots in lithium-ion battery pouch cells: Models and bounds

Drummond, Ross; Guiver, Chris; Turner, Matthew C.; Tredenick, Eloise C.; Duncan, Stephen R.

Abstract

Lithium-ion batteries have grown larger in recent years in response to the need to increase pack-level energy densities. One of the main issues that emerges in these large format cells are heterogeneities. In particular, temperature hotspots in large pouch cells have been shown to influence degradation rates and fast charging limits. Motivated by these issues, this paper proposes computationally efficient models and bounds to characterise thermal hotspots in pouch cells. The models are validated against experimental data and shown to capture the spread in temperature across the pouch cell. The bounds exploit external positivity of the underlying system to improve scalability and are shown to be tight under constant current cycling. Through these results, bounds for the maximum temperature a pouch cell will experience during an arbitrary use-profile can be computed at scale and so be used to support battery safety and control.

Citation

Drummond, R., Guiver, C., Turner, M. C., Tredenick, E. C., & Duncan, S. R. (2025, August). Hotspots in lithium-ion battery pouch cells: Models and bounds. Presented at The 9th IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA) 2025, San Diego, CA, USA

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: The 9th IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA) 2025
• Start Date: Aug 25, 2025
• End Date: Aug 27, 2025
• Acceptance Date: May 15, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jun 23, 2025
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: Lithium-ion batteries, externally positive systems, thermal hotspot
• Publisher URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/1822104/all-proceedings
• External URL: https://ccta2025.ieeecss.org/