Two Energy Storage Risk Case Studies: Cells and Battery Racking
As part of our SPI 2020 presentations, CEA's Chris Wright revealed two battery fire risk case studies involving cells and racking.
Video Transcript:
Battery Cell Case Study - Electrode Coating
And here, you see a slide talking about a case study for a battery cell manufacturing that we found. Really we found during the manufacturing process, we found electrode wrinkles during coding, and these wrinkles can lead to uneven coating, which can result in hotspots and even an internal short circuit in the battery, which can lead to a fire.
Battery Rack Case Study - Overtemperature During Charge
And here's a case study for a battery rack. And in this situation during the functional and performance testing, the battery rack was not capable of charging fully at the 1C rate. It was able to charge fully at a 0.5C rate, but when we went to the rated charge and discharge, it was not able to charge at a 1C rate, and we had BMS errors and we had BMS temperature errors, and come to find out that we had a higher resistance caused by the similar metals at the battery module electrical terminals. [Which] resulted in that power resistance result in over temp condition on some of the modules. And we found that during the functional testing and performance testing, we were able to get that mitigated and get the modules corrected before rack shipped out.
