Simple evaluation method of mechanical strength and mechanical fatigue of negative electrode for lithium-ion battery

Abstract

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are expected to be main power sources of automobiles. Nevertheless, LIBs easily lead to serious incidents because LIBs have high energy density. For application to automobiles, the reliability of LIBs should be guaranteed against various external loads. Especially, static loads and cyclic loads are constantly applied on LIBs because of vibration and thermal stress induced in automobiles, and fatigue damage occurs in electrodes of the LIBs. In this respect, it is important to evaluate mechanical strength and mechanical fatigue property of electrodes, such as tensile strength and S-N curves. This study has proposed a simple evaluation method of the mechanical strength and the fatigue property of electrodes for LIBs by using mechanical models of the electrodes. The actual alignment of particles of active material is random, and mechanical models based on the actual alignment are too complex to derive the main factor of mechanics of the electrodes. The proposed models approximate the alignment of the particles as the body-centered cubic (bcc) and the face-centered cubic (fcc) which are the well-known crystal lattices. In order to verify the proposed method, static tensile tests and bending fatigue tests of negative electrodes for LIBs have been conducted. From the test results, the tensile strength of the negative electrodes estimated by the proposed models agree with the experimental values, and the difference between the bcc model and the fcc model is smaller than the variation of the experimental values. The estimation value of the stress that initiates a crack on the negative electrodes by 1 cycle agrees with the tensile strength. The number of cycles linearly increases in the log scale with the decrease of the stress amplitude, and the stress amplitude at the 10⁶–10⁷ cycles agrees with the half of the tensile strength.