Accelerated energy capacity measurement of lithium-ion cells to support future circular economy strategies for electric vehicles

Within the academic and industrial communities there has been an increasing desire to better understand the sustainability of producing vehicles that contain embedded electrochemical energy storage. Underpinning a number of studies that evaluate different circular economy strategies for the electric vehicle (EV) or Hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) battery system are implicit assumptions about the retained capacity or State of Health (SOH) of the battery. International standards and best-practice guides exist that address the performance evaluation of both EV and HEV battery systems. However, a common theme is that the test duration can be excessive and last for a number of hours. The aim of this research is to assess whether energy capacity measurements of Li-ion cells can be accelerated; reducing the test duration to a value that may facilitate further EOL options. Experimental results are presented that highlight it is possible to significantly reduce the duration of the battery characterization test by 70-90% while still retaining levels of measurement accuracy for retained energy capacity in the order of 1% for cell temperatures equal to 25 °C. Even at elevated temperatures of 40 °C, the peak measurement error was found to be only 3%. Based on these experimental results, a simple cost-function is formulated to highlight the flexibility of the proposed test framework. This approach would allow different organizations to prioritize the relative importance of test accuracy verses experimental test time when grading used Li-ion cells for different end-of-life (EOL) applications.