A deep-learning approach to parameter fitting for a lithium metal battery cycling model, validated with experimental cell cycling time series

Symmetric coin cell cycling is an important tool for the analysis of battery materials, enabling the study of electrode/electrolyte systems under realistic operating conditions. In the case of metal lithium SEI growth and shape changes, cycling studies are especially important to assess the impact of the alternation of anodic–cathodic polarization with the relevant electrolyte geometry and mass-transport conditions. Notwithstanding notable progress in analysis of lithium/lithium symmetric coin cell cycling data, on the one hand, some aspects of the cell electrochemical response still warrant investigation, and, on the other hand, very limited quantitative use is made of large corpora of experimental data generated in electrochemical experiments. This study contributes to shedding light on this highly technologically relevant problem, thanks to the combination of quantitative data exploitation and Partial Differential Equation (PDE) modelling for metal anode cycling. Toward this goal, we propose the use of a Convolutional Neural Network-Long-Short Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) to identify relevant physico-chemical parameters in the PDE model and to describe the behaviour of simulated and experimental charge–discharge profiles. Specifically, we have carried out parameter identification tasks for experimental data regarding the cycling of symmetric coin cells with Li chips as electrodes and LP30 electrolyte. Representative selection of numerical results highlights the advantages of this new approach with respect to traditional Least Squares fitting.