
Preventing Li Ion Battery Failures From a Manufacturing and Design Perspective
How can you be proactive and make sure your cell supplier is the right one and you don’t end up with thermal events and field failures? Is it enough to qualify a cell manufacturer according to industry standards? The answer is that the majority of compliance based testing is related to abuse tolerance. However, the vast majority of field failures do not occur under abuse scenarios, but happen under normal operating conditions due to manufacturing flaws or design and system tolerance issues that cause internal shorts. In this webinar, you will learn about common lithium ion battery failure modes and how to be proactive in preventing these.
This webinar will focus on the following key topics:
• Gain an understanding of lithium ion battery failure mechanisms and the pathway to thermal events
• Learn how cell design impacts battery safety and reliability
• Learn the basic steps in a lithium ion cell manufacturing process, and how the process controls affect safety and reliability
• Come away with a checklist to qualify your cell manufacturer
Presenter
Vidyu Challa – Technical Director at DfR Solutions
Vidyu Challa is Technical Director at DfR Solutions where she works on battery reliability and safety issues. Dr. Challa helps customers with their battery challenges including design reviews, manufacturing audits and supplier qualification. She obtained a PhD from CALCE Electronic Products and Systems Center at the
University of Maryland. She has broad based expertise that includes engineering technology start-up experience, product development, R&D, and business development. Dr. Challa has published her work in journals, presented at conferences and written blog articles.
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Avoid Battery Explosions and Fires – With Right Data and Better Designs
Modern Li Ion batteries contain hazardous chemicals and heat up during use – this combination always has the potential to cause fires and explosions. This presentation will focus on improving the understanding of how such incidents occur, what can be done to avoid them and how the risk can be minimized during early stage design.
The solution lies in knowledge of the heat generation rate during normal use, and information about safe boundaries such as temperature, discharge rate & overcharge in realistic situations that represent actual conditions of use. Data from commercial batteries of different types, including videos of batteries undergoing thermal runaway, will be used to illustrate these points.
A relatively new technique will also be discussed with data, which allows total heat output during discharge to be measured on-line and this can be used both for design and battery modelling. Examples of the data will be provided.
This webinar will focus on the following key topics:
• Why battery fires and explosions occur
• How to design safer batteries through understanding of heat generation
• Video evidence of batteries under explosive conditions
• How better thermal management systems can be designed – based on heat measurement from isothermal calorimetry
• Laboratory instruments suitable for testing and data generation
Presenter
Dr. Jasbir Singh – Managing Director at Hazard Evaluation Laboratory
Jasbir is a chemical engineer specializing in thermal hazards and calorimetry, traditionally for the chemical industry but now increasingly involved in battery safety, especially Li-ion EV and related types.
A graduate of Imperial College (London), where he undertook PhD into combustion and explosions, his experience includes many years in process design for the chemical and petrochemical industries. He is currently developing test methods and instruments for use in design of battery thermal management systems.
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Stability of Li7La3Zr2O12 Garnet Solid-State Electrolyte Against Metallic Lithium
Energy storage demands will require safer, cheaper and higher performance electrochemical energy storage. While the primary strategy for improving performance has focused on state-of-the-art Li-ion batteries, this work seeks to develop solid-state batteries employing metallic Li anode. Recently, the ceramic electrolyte, Li7La3Zr2O12 (LLZO) cubic garnet, has shown promise owing to its unique combination of properties such as high Li-ion conductivity and electrochemical stability. Generally, LLZO is synthesized through powder processing and sintering at high temperature to produce dense membrane. Processing of the ceramic materials produces internal and surface flaws which will inhibit lithium transport creating localized current density and control the stability against Li dendrite propagation. This presentation will discuss new improvement in methodology to evaluate the integrity of LLZO membrane.
This webinar will focus on the following key topics:
• Methodology to evaluate the integrity of LLZO by identifying the microstructural flaws and their impact on mechanical properties
• DC cycling, EIS, XPS will be shown to determine the reactions that govern the maximum current density
• Correlate the electrochemical stability and critical current density with defects in polycrystalline solid state LLZO electrolyte
Presenter
Asma Sharafi – PhD Student with Jeff Sakamoto at University of Michigan
Asma received her MS in Chemistry (material science) in 2013 at University of Georgia. Currently, she is a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at University of Michigan under Jeff Sakamoto’s supervision. The primary focus of her research is on the development of new solid state electrolyte (SSE) with the garnet structure (Li7La3Zr2O12) that offer unprecedented safety and durability.
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Battery Selection Tutorial Course 3/3: Integrating Your Battery Into Your Product – Designing for Worst-Case Scenarios
The last part in Exponent’s three-part series, this webinar will focus on the finished product from the viewpoint of the battery. How can you best protect your battery within your device? Is your battery going to be user-replaceable? If you’re creating multi-cell packs, how should they be separated from (yet still connected to) each other? Should a thermal event occur, how can you prevent that from cascading through the whole pack? This webinar will help to answer many of those questions, and discuss design questions to help safeguard your battery pack throughout its entire lifecycle.
This webinar will focus on the following key topics:
• Creating multi-cell packs
• Containing thermal runaway events
Presenter
Exponent – a multidisciplinary engineering and scientific consulting firm with significant experience in various aspects of battery design, safety testing and failure analysis.
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