Influence of operational condition on lithium plating for commercial lithium-ion batteries – Electrochemical experiments and post-mortem-analysis

The lifetime and safety of lithium-ion batteries are key requirements for successful market introduction of electro mobility. Especially charging at low temperature and fast charging, known to provoke lithium plating, is an important issue for automotive engineers. Lithium plating, leading both to ageing as well as safety risks, is known to play a crucial role in system design of the application. To gain knowledge of different influence factors on lithium plating, low-temperature ageing tests are performed in this work. Commercial lithium-ion batteries of various types are tested under various operational conditions such as temperature, current, state of charge, charging strategy as well as state of health. To analyse the ageing behaviour, capacity fade and resistance increase are tracked over lifetime. The results of this large experimental survey on lithium plating provide support for the design of operation strategies for the implementation in battery management systems. To further investigate the underlying degradation mechanisms, differential voltage curves and impedance spectra are analysed and a post-mortem analysis of anode degradation is performed for a selected technology. The results confirm the deposition of metallic lithium or lithium compounds in the porous structure and suggest a strongly inhomogeneous deposition over the electrode thickness with a dense deposition layer close to the separator for the considered cell. It is shown that this inhomogeneous deposition can even lead to loss of active material. The plurality of the investigated technologies demonstrates large differences between different technologies concerning low-temperature behaviour and gives insight to the impact of cell properties. For the sample of cells considered in this work, cells rated to provide high power are found to be subject to faster degradation at low temperatures compared to high-energy cells, probably due to little self-heating. For application this result shows that cells designed for high current rates are not necessarily providing a good low-temperature performance.