Comparative Study on the Calendar Aging Behavior of Six Different Lithium-Ion Cell Chemistries in Terms of Parameter Variation

The degradation of lithium-ion cells is an important aspect, not only for quality management, but also for the customer of the application like, e.g., scooters or electric vehicles. During the lifetime of the system, the overall health on the battery plays a key role in its depreciation. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor the health of the battery during operation, i.e., cycle life, but also during stationary conditions, i.e., calendar aging. In this work, the degradation due to calendar aging is analyzed for six different cell chemistries in terms of capacity degradation and impedance increase and their performance are being compared. In a new proposed metric, the relative deviations between various cells with the exact identical aging history are being analyzed for their degradation effects and their differences, which stands out in comparison to similar research. The capacity loss was found to be most drastic at 60 °C and at higher storage voltages, even for titanate-oxide cells. LiNiMnCoO2 (NMC), LiNiCoAlO2 (NCA) and Li2TiO3 (LTO) cells at 60 °C showed the most drastic capacity decrease. NMC and NCA cells at 60 °C and highest storage voltage did not show any open circuit voltage, as their current interrupt mechanism triggered. The effect of aging shows no uniform impact on the changes in the capacity variance when comparing different aging conditions, with respect to the evaluated standard deviation for all cells. The focus of this work was on the calendar aging effect and may be supplemented in a second study for cyclic aging.