Effect of External Compression on the Thermal Runaway of Lithium-Ion Battery Cells during Crush Tests: Insights for Improved Safety Assessment

To gain better understanding of the safety behavior of lithium-ion batteries under mechanical stress, crush tests are performed and reported in literature and in standards. However, many of these tests are conducted without the use of a cell clamping device, whereas external pressure is applied to the cell in a battery module in applications such as in an electric vehicle. The objective of this manuscript is to determine the effect of differing external compression on the thermal runaway of battery cells. Therefore, in this study, crush tests are performed with a hemispherical punch in a battery cell test chamber on commercially available 5 Ah pouch cells in a clamping device at four different normal stresses. The results are compared to cells that are free to expand with gas evolution. It is shown that applying compression to the cells not only results in a greater reproducibility of the experiments but that it also affects the thermal runaway process itself. With decreasing clamping stresses, the reaction time of the thermal runaway is increased by up to 19%, and the mass ejection is decreased by up to 10%, which, in turn, strongly influences the measurable gas concentrations by up to 80%. Based on this, a defined clamping compression was selected to obtain comparable results for different cell formats.