An Electro-chemo-thermo-mechanical Coupled Three-dimensional Computational Framework for Lithium-ion Batteries

Thermal and mechanical effects play a vital role in determining the electrochemical behavior of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Non-uniform temperature distribution and mechanical deformation can result in uneven electrochemical states, leading to spatially varying aging rates that significantly shorten cell lifetime. In order to improve simulation accuracy and thus the quality of computational battery design optimization, it is therefore essential to capture these coupled phenomena in a simulation model of a full battery cell. In this work, an electro-chemo-thermo-mechanical coupled framework is proposed to simulate LIBs in the three-dimensional space. In this new framework, a recently proposed one-dimensional electrochemical model, which includes the impact of mechanical deformation and local lithiation state on the effective transport properties of the charged species, is coupled with a three-dimensional thermomechanical model. A unique coupling scheme is proposed to handle information exchange between these two models. This framework allows us to accurately and efficiently study the behavior of three-dimensional cells with realistic geometry and resolve the spatial variation of interested fields. Two commercial cells are studied to show the performance of the newly proposed battery simulation framework.