| Abstract |
Serially connected batteries present a cell-to-cell variation in their electrochemical behavior that tends to increase over the lifetime. The decision for the best circular economy option for aged or defective battery packs - i.e., repair, remanufacturing, or recycling - requires comprehensive testing, analysis, and an according data basis. Remanufacturing of battery packs refers to the replacement of individual (sub-)modules or cells which are defective or show a diverging aging behavior to the rest of the battery units. A detection algorithm is required to decide if a significant inhomogeneity in a serial connection of batteries is present. For this reason, virtual battery packs are built based on the measurement of 12 individual batteries of the same type. Cell-to-cell variations are determined at the begin of life and a novel representation for the quantitative and qualitative analysis is given. This work extracts impedance-based features of different serial battery pack configurations through a novel comparative analysis approach. The features are extracted from Bode and Nyquist plots and the real and imaginary parts of the impedance itself. The detectability is analyzed depending on the number of cells and the underlying effects are discussed. A detailed sensitivity analysis is carried out for the most promising features, in which the influence of the cell-to-cell variations, the aging condition, and the aging mechanism are analyzed. The feature that shows the highest sensitivity, the so called low-frequency minimum, is able to detect single outliers within a high number of serially connected cells. |
