When LIBs are operated improperly, either outside of the specifications of its manufacturer or due to cell defects, electrical and chemical energies inside the cells can be unintentionally released and lead to gassing, fires, or even explosions. During these incidents, the most energetic catastrophic failure of a LIB system is a cascading thermal runaway event.

As part of Solar Power International’s (SPI) 2020's virtual conference, CEA's Chris Wright offered several lessons about the inherent risks of lithium-ion energy storage and how thermal runaway fires can occur.

Video Transcript:

Thermal runaway at the cell level can typically be mitigated to some extent. The big concern, or the big risk, is thermal runaway that cascades from a single cell to adjacent cell. Then you can actually consume a battery module and maybe even then spread from battery module to battery module. So hazard assessments are key to determining what safety and mitigation actions are needed to ensure your battery storage system is safe.

And here's a little more information on thermal runaway from a battery sale. Really the path of how you get there typically is some type of abuse factor or a manufacturing defect can actually drive the batteries into thermal runaway. The manufacturing defects can affect many parts of the cell. In fact, the manufacturing defect can cause the cells to go into thermal runaway when it is not under any of the typical abuse conditions. So again, quality matters. And even at the cell level, it does matter.

And here's just a few selected quality risk for battery cell manufacturing. A lot of these come from our experience in the QA world, going into global battery factories and doing quality audits and process monitoring. But as you can see, you know, again, many battery cell factories are highly automated, but even though they're highly automated, there's a lot of variation between quality systems, even between manufacturing process capability and, you know, the, the benchmarking capabilities between factories can really support the ability to understand risk and understand what a buyer is getting into when they're working with certain battery suppliers.

Here are some selected risks from our audit and battery module manufacturing. And battery modules, again, are really where you take the individual battery cells and you mechanically package them. And oftentimes there may or may not be some thermal management incorporated into the module, whether it just be something as simple as a passive heat sink to allow air to blow over, or it's actually the water cooled systems, liquid cooled system replace. And then the module has some type of battery manager system attached to it that helps oversee...