Safer batteries and reliable power: guiding research for next-generation energy storage

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Lithium-ion batteries, in your pocket, packed into warehouses, and embedded in critical infrastructure, quietly power much of modern America.

Demand for indispensable energy storage solutions continues to rise, prompting energy experts to explore next-generation (next-generation) designs for high-performance technologies, including alkaline metal anodes, solid electrolytes, and in-ground cathode materials. However, safety is critical to ensuring successful deployment of these systems.

“Over the years, battery researchers and engineers have developed a deep understanding of the factors that lead to the failure of conventional lithium-ion batteries. However, the behavior of next-generation batteries is not yet well understood,” said Donal Finnegan, senior energy storage scientist at NREL. “We are seeing major differences in the kinetics, toxicity, mechanical durability, and fire suppression strategies of new materials. The better we understand these risks, the safer we will be able to design and prepare future battery systems.”

A recent Nature Perspective written by NREL researchers including Finegan takes a close look at the current landscape of battery safety research, focusing on the new risks and opportunities of emerging energy storage technologies. In addition, this perspective proposes a strategic approach to evaluate battery integrity at the electrode, pack, and cell levels. This rigorous process takes into account various conditions — such as oxygen index limit, abuse conditions, charging status, and cycle history — in relation to standard battery behavior.

A safety-first approach to battery research

NREL is a global leader in battery safety research, providing cutting-edge characterization, advanced machine learning and multi-scale modeling to evaluate energy storage systems. Researchers work closely with industry innovators to share knowledge, access lab-level capabilities, and overcome challenges to bring new technologies to market.

“Battery safety research is a cornerstone of our work at NREL and is essential to strengthening America’s energy infrastructure,” said Matt Keyser, senior energy storage engineer and director at NREL. “Safer batteries increase the availability of energy to power everything from consumer electronics to homeland security systems. However, we need a targeted strategy to expand battery safety research to support the development and adoption of new battery technologies.”

NREL implements a rigorous process to evaluate the safety of battery designs, and uses a comprehensive approach to characterize cells and materials to understand their responses to various abuse conditions throughout their life. Insights from battery safety research are critical to improving cell designs, defining safe operating systems, and standardizing practices to guide first responders in responding to battery hazards.

While some of these changes open the door to safer, more flexible and lighter battery systems, they also bring challenges, such as managing rapid release of gas, toxic byproducts, and extreme thermal reactions. Methods used to measure the risks of conventional lithium-ion batteries can be directly applied to next-generation cells, but there are other areas that require additional attention.

It can take years to scale research from new materials to battery pack level testing, but recent advances in modeling and artificial intelligence can speed up the process and advance our understanding of new materials. These technologies reveal new insights into the safety of emerging battery designs, and predict how they will behave in various applications, such as grid-scale storage. NREL’s expertise in this area allows researchers to evaluate data across length scales, from microscopic samples to much larger cell sizes, and explain differences in cell integrity behaviors as a function of their size and abuse status.

“We have developed modeling strategies that bridge the gap between safety data generated at the material level and the behavior of large commercial batteries,” Finnegan said. “AI will play a central role in quickly predicting how batteries will behave under different conditions in real-world scenarios to assess the safety of future battery designs.”

Learn more about energy storage, transportation, and mobility research at NREL. And sign up for NREL’s Transportation and Mobility Research newsletter to stay up to date on the latest news.

Article from NREL. Written by Rebecca Martino