Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Mathematik
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Lithium-ion batteries are increasingly becoming an ubiquitous part of our everyday life - they are present in mobile phones, laptops, tools, cars, etc. However, there are still many concerns about their longevity and their safety. In this work we focus on the simulation of several degradation mechanisms on the microscopic scale, where one can resolve the active materials inside the electrodes of the lithium-ion batteries as porous structures. We mainly study two aspects - heat generation and mechanical stress. For the former we consider an electrochemical non-isothermal model on the spatially resolved porous scale to observe the temperature increase inside a battery cell, as well as to observe the individual heat sources to assess their contributions to the total heat generation. As a result from our experiments, we determined that the temperature has very small spatial variance for our test cases and thus allows for an ODE formulation of the heat equation.
The second aspect that we consider is the generation of mechanical stress as a result of the insertion of lithium ions in the electrode materials. We study two approaches - using small strain models and finite strain models. For the small strain models, the initial geometry and the current geometry coincide. The model considers a diffusion equation for the lithium ions and equilibrium equation for the mechanical stress. First, we test a single perforated cylindrical particle using different boundary conditions for the displacement and with Neumann boundary conditions for the diffusion equation. We also test for cylindrical particles, but with boundary conditions for the diffusion equation in the electrodes coming from an isothermal electrochemical model for the whole battery cell. For the finite strain models we take in consideration the deformation of the initial geometry as a result of the intercalation and the mechanical stress. We compare two elastic models to study the sensitivity of the predicted elastic behavior on the specific model used. We also consider a softening of the active material dependent on the concentration of the lithium ions and using data for silicon electrodes. We recover the general behavior of the stress from known physical experiments.
Some models, like the mechanical models we use, depend on the local values of the concentration to predict the mechanical stress. In that sense we perform a short comparative study between the Finite Element Method with tetrahedral elements and the Finite Volume Method with voxel volumes for an isothermal electrochemical model.
The spatial discretizations of the PDEs are done using the Finite Element Method. For some models we have discontinuous quantities where we adapt the FEM accordingly. The time derivatives are discretized using the implicit Backward Euler method. The nonlinear systems are linearized using the Newton method. All of the discretized models are implemented in a C++ framework developed during the thesis.
Lithium-ion batteries are broadly used nowadays in all kinds of portable electronics, such as laptops, cell phones, tablets, e-book readers, digital cameras, etc. They are preferred to other types of rechargeable batteries due to their superior characteristics, such as light weight and high energy density, no memory effect, and a big number of charge/discharge cycles. The high demand and applicability of Li-ion batteries naturally give rise to the unceasing necessity of developing better batteries in terms of performance and lifetime. The aim of the mathematical modelling of Li-ion batteries is to help engineers test different battery configurations and electrode materials faster and cheaper. Lithium-ion batteries are multiscale systems. A typical Li-ion battery consists of multiple connected electrochemical battery cells. Each cell has two electrodes - anode and cathode, as well as a separator between them that prevents a short circuit.
Both electrodes have porous structure composed of two phases - solid and electrolyte. We call macroscale the lengthscale of the whole electrode and microscale - the lengthscale at which we can distinguish the complex porous structure of the electrodes. We start from a Li-ion battery model derived on the microscale. The model is based on nonlinear diffusion type of equations for the transport of Lithium ions and charges in the electrolyte and in the active material. Electrochemical reactions on the solid-electrolyte interface couple the two phases. The interface kinetics is modelled by the highly nonlinear Butler-Volmer interface conditions. Direct numerical simulations with standard methods, such as the Finite Element Method or Finite Volume Method, lead to ill-conditioned problems with a huge number of degrees of freedom which are difficult to solve. Therefore, the aim of this work is to derive upscaled models on the lengthscale of the whole electrode so that we do not have to resolve all the small-scale features of the porous microstructure thus reducing the computational time and cost. We do this by applying two different upscaling techniques - the Asymptotic Homogenization Method and the Multiscale Finite Element Method (MsFEM). We consider the electrolyte and the solid as two self-complementary perforated domains and we exploit this idea with both upscaling methods. The first method is restricted only to periodic media and periodically oscillating solutions while the second method can be applied to randomly oscillating solutions and is based on the Finite Element Method framework. We apply the Asymptotic Homogenization Method to derive a coupled macro-micro upscaled model under the assumption of periodic electrode microstructure. A crucial step in the homogenization procedure is the upscaling of the Butler-Volmer interface conditions. We rigorously determine the asymptotic order of the interface exchange current densities and we perform a comprehensive numerical study in order to validate the derived homogenized Li-ion battery model. In order to upscale the microscale battery problem in the case of random electrode microstructure we apply the MsFEM, extended to problems in perforated domains with Neumann boundary conditions on the holes. We conduct a detailed numerical investigation of the proposed algorithm and we show numerical convergence of the method that we design. We also apply the developed technique to a simplified two-dimensional Li-ion battery problem and we show numerical convergence of the solution obtained with the MsFEM to the reference microscale one.