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Reliability Engineering and System Safety 134 (2015) 169177
art ic l e i nf o a b s t r a c t
Article history: Battery technology is an enabling technology for electric vehicles (EVs), and improving its safety and
Received 28 October 2013 reliability while reducing its cost will benet its application to EVs. In this paper, a method on the design
Received in revised form and analysis of lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery pack from the reliability perspective is presented. The
3 September 2014
analysis is based on the degradation of the battery pack, which is related to the cells conguration in the
Accepted 7 October 2014
battery pack and the state of health (SoH) of all the Li-ion cells in the pack. Universal Generating
Available online 29 October 2014
Function (UGF) technique is used for reliability analysis. As adding new battery cells to the battery pack
Keywords: in the production process can improve its reliability but it also increases cost, tradeoff between the
Multi-state systems number of the redundant battery cells, the conguration of the redundant cells and their reliability is
Reliability
investigated in this work.
Universal generating function
& 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
State of health
Battery pack
Electric vehicle
1. Introduction applications of the Li-ion battery pack in EVs. The high cost of
the pack in turn is related to the reliability of the pack because if
In view of the fossil fuel depletion and the emission of green- the pack has low charge/discharge cycle life time, the replacement
house gases (GHG) with the fossil fuel, and the fact that transpor- frequency of the pack will be high, and this will increase the
tation is a major source of GHG emission and usage of the fossil operating cost of the EVs.
fuel, research and development of electric vehicles (EVs) are Currently, the battery pack of EV contains more than 100 Li-ion
blooming signicantly. With EVs, their energy sources can be cells, and when one cell becomes aged, other cells will have to
renewable clean energy sources through the recharging of Li-ion carry the load and this can cause other cells to degrade rapidly. On
battery packs from these clean energy sources, and no GHG the other hand, due to the safety consideration, one cannot open
emission occurs with EVs. the pack and replace the aged cells in the pack. Thus, when a few
These EVs are driven by electric motors instead of internal cells get aged, the entire pack will have to be replaced and sent to
combustion engines. These motors are powered by the Li-ion the workshop, and this increases the operating cost of EVs
battery packs in the vehicles. Li-ion batteries are used because signicantly and unnecessary.
they have the highest energy and power densities, and their life The above-mentioned situations will happen even with the use
time is sufciently longer [1]. In fact, it is because of the Li-ion of reliable cells, and thus to reduce the unnecessary replacement
battery technology that enables EVs to be a realistic product that of the pack and to prolong the life span of the pack, redundant
we see in the market today worldwide [2]. cells are designed in the pack [3].
While EVs are now commercial products, there are three main Several works reported the reliability analysis of battery packs,
challenges that are being researched into, namely the limited and they can be divided into the following categories of focus. The
driving range, long batteries charging time and high cost of the references quoted below are the typical papers selected for each
battery pack [2]. All these challenges are closely link to the category.
n
1.1. Thermal management of battery pack to improve pack reliability
Corresponding author at: TUM CREATE, 1 CREATE Way, #10-02 CREATE Tower,
Singapore 138602, Singapore.
E-mail addresses: zhitao.liu@tum-create.edu.sg (Z. Liu), The temperature in battery pack is an important factor which
cmtan@mail.cgu.edu.tw (C. Tan), eng001@e.ntu.edu.sg (F. Leng). affects the safety and reliability of the cells when the vehicle is
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2014.10.010
0951-8320/& 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
170 Z. Liu et al. / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 134 (2015) 169177
Since there are inevitable differences in the cells, a cell in battery Fig. 3. Structure c (left) and structure d (right).
packs could become overcharged and/or over-discharged. This could
in turn reduce the lifetime of the packs. Generally speaking, the
health state of an individual degraded cell is difcult to detect in a
battery pack. To ensure safe driving, the battery packs are routinely
replaced even though they do not exhibit any problems, but this will
increase the maintenance cost for the drivers. Prognostic and health
monitoring (PHM) technology is thus proposed to monitor the
battery pack in the EVs. It can monitor the battery pack states during
their operations, and extend their useful lives correspondingly [11].
In order to improve the reliability and safety of a battery pack,
one simple and direct method is to add redundant cells to the
battery pack, but two associated questions should be investigated.
First, the conguration of the redundant cells in the battery pack;
Second, the number of redundant cells for cost effectiveness. In
this work, a design concept is developed to answer these two
questions quantitatively.
For the rst question, the effect of cells conguration in the
pack on the packs reliability is generally overlooked. However,
the effect can be signicant. Let us illustrate the effect with the
following idealistic example.
Fig. 4. The probability for different structures.
Assuming perfect conversion such that the total power in the
battery pack can be converted into the required voltages and
currents at a given output power without any loss, Figs. 13 show
From the above example, we can see that the reliabilities of the
four possible congurations of 10 identical cells in a battery pack.
parallel-series structures, i.e. structures b and d are higher than
Assuming every cell has two states, namely the normal and
the series-parallel congurations, i.e. structure a and c, with
abnormal, and the probability of a cell in the abnormal state is
structure d being the best for the reliability. Therefore, if the
x. Given that the different battery packs are to supply the same
redundant cell number and cost are not in consideration, adding
power P, the current I through each cell in the 4 different cong-
more parallel branches in battery pack will be preferred, and its
urations will be the same and equal to I P=10V 0 , where V 0 is the
reliability can be greatly enhanced [12]. With cost consideration,
voltage of a cell. If we assume that the battery packs are charged/
tradeoff between reliability and the number of the cells is
discharged for the same number of cycles, and the degradation of
inevitable, and this is the focus of this work.
the cells are identical, the probability of normal state for the battery
State of health (SoH) of the cells will be used here for analysis.
packs with different congurations could be calculated as follows,
SoH is dened as a variable which reects the general health
and they are shown in Fig. 4.
condition of a cell and its ability to deliver specied energy or
h i2
P a 1 1 1 x5 1a charge as compared to its fresh state. The knowledge of SoH can be
used to recognize ongoing or abrupt degradation of the cells and
5 to prevent possible failure.
P b 1 x2 1b There have been many SoH methods in literatures [1317], and
none is considered as standard currently. To illustrate our design
h i5
P c 1 1 1 x 2 1c concept, any SoH method that models the effects of temperature,
chargedischarge cycling and current on cell capacity fading, and its
2 rate capability losses will be good enough for our purpose. In this
P d 1 x5 1d work, we choose the model proposed in [17], which is also used by
others [18,19]. This model is based on the electrochemistry mechan-
isms of the cells. With this model, a capacity fade prediction that
describes the degradation effects from the charge and discharge
cycling number, temperature and the discharge rate is possible.
To calculate the reliability of a battery pack using the cells SoH,
Fig. 1. Structure a. multi-state systems (MSS) and universal generating function (UGF)
Z. Liu et al. / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 134 (2015) 169177 171
techniques are employed in this work. Many real-world systems are UGF for the design assessment. As mentioned before, battery pack
composed of multi-state components, which have different perfor- degradation is a complex multi-states process for each cell in the
mance levels and failure modes with various effects on the systems pack, and it depends on many factors, such as cell number, cell
entire performance. Such systems are called multi-state systems conguration, cycle number and state of health etc., hence MSS is
[20]. For MSS, the system performance will be essentially different needed for the modelling of the cells reliability and UGF is required
for components with different performance rates. In order to to combine the different states of the cells for the reliability
calculate the reliability of MSS, universal generating function tech- evaluation of the entire pack. The above mentioned design methods
nique is applied. are not applicable to battery pack for its design for reliability.
The UGF methodology is an essential tool to obtain the perfor- The usage of MSS and UGF combination have been used for the
mance distribution of an overall system from the performance study of predictive maintenance which is reliability based [23,24].
distributions of the individual elements in the system. UGF has Li et al. [31] used UGF to develop a MSS model for reliability
been used to analyze the reliability and optimize the structures of assessment of a distributed systems. Tian et al. [32] applied UGF for
MSS [21,22], and it is found to be effective and can be applied to a MSS series-parallel system to determine the optimal component
solve many problems of MSS. Tan et al. [23,24] applied UGF to study reliabilities and redundancy levels for each sub-system. Their
the reliability of a repairable system under the various maintenance optimization objective was cost, and different versions of the
schemes, and demonstrate the signicant benet of predictive components with different performance rates were also considered.
maintenance. UGF was also used to analyze the reliability of primary In contrast to the work of Tian et al. [32], we consider only one
battery packs with dened required capacities and voltages in [25]. version of battery cells, but their performances and health states are
There have been many reliability-based design methodologies for varying and governed by a statistical distribution. Also, the reliability
different applications. A scheme is proposed to dene optimum of a battery pack is sensitive to the cells connection conguration as
design domains of LED-based luminaires for a given light output illustrated earlier, and such conguration is considered in the design
requirement by considering their reliability in [26]. Another method for reliability. Furthermore, the purpose of this work is to provide a
is proposed for reliability-based design optimization on the basis of design for a given required reliability of the battery pack with
the concept of reliable design space, within which all design could minimum cost, and thus reliability curve of a battery pack is needed.
satisfy the reliability requirements in [27]. In [28], an integrated Thus the method of Tian et al. [32] cannot be applied directly, and a
algorithm system is proposed to implement the reliability-based new methodology is proposed in this work.
design for offshore towers that enable them to perform well in Using the combination of MSS and UGF, we propose a reliability-
complicated environment conditions. A mixed redundancy strategy based design concept for Lithium-ion battery packs, considering the
is proposed by Ardakan et al. [29] to determine the component type, tradeoff between the number of the redundant battery cells, the
redundancy level, number of active and cold-standby units for conguration of the redundant cells, and their reliability. This
system in order to maximize the system reliability. Zhang et al. concept provides a solution for the battery pack designers.
[30] provided a design for a modular converter system with According to the capacity fade model of Li-ion cells [17], we
consideration of the trade-offs between reliability, cost and space rst calculate the SoH of the cells. By assuming the SoH of all the
consumption, and they provided insights and guidance for designers cells following normal distribution, UGF technique is applied to
in their decision-making. However, none of them using MSS and calculate the reliability of a battery pack. We will show the
reliability change by adding redundant cells to the battery pack
with different congurations, and the battery pack design with the
Table 1 highest reliability and minimum number of redundant cells.
Values of the parameters in Eq. (6) at different temperatures [17].
The remaining paper is organized as follows. The capacity fade
Cycling temperature (1C) k1 [cycle 2] k2 [cycle 1] k3 [A 1] model of the Li-ion cells is given in Section 2, and the MSS for
describing the SoH of a battery pack and the UGF technique for
2.68 10 2 ( r 300) calculating its reliability are shown in Section 3. In Section 4, the
25 8.5 10 8 2.5 10 4
7.26 10 2 ( r 800) reliability of a battery pack is rst calculated based on the MSS and
5.20 10 2 ( r300)
50 1.6 10 6 2.9 10 4 UGF techniques, and the effects from the cycling number, tem-
6.82 10 2 ( r500)
perature and the discharge rate are simulated. The reliabilities of
Fig. 5. The conguration of the battery pack with redundant cells. (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version
of this article.)
172 Z. Liu et al. / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 134 (2015) 169177
the battery pack by adding redundant cells with different struc- redundant cells added, i.e. having m m n n cells, is
tures at different temperatures are then calculated. Section 5 denoted as battery pack II.
shows our experimental plan for the verication of our design In order to calculate the reliability of the battery pack using the
concept and the associated challenges. Conclusions and future SoH of all the cells in the battery pack, the SoH is assumed to be a
works are given in Section 6. normal distribution N; 2 at any instant of time. This means that
Eq. (6) provides only the mean SoH of the cells in a battery pack, and
the individual cells SoH is different from each others due to material
2. The capacity fade model of lithium-ion battery cell variations of the fresh cells, the different degree of damages and
their susceptibility to these damages during the charge/discharge
The SoH of a lithium-ion battery cell is dened as [33,34], cycles and the cell balancing method in the battery management
Q max aged systems. As the number of cells is usually large in a battery pack
SoH 2 (4100), the cells SoH in the battery pack can be considered as a
Q max new
normal distribution, according to the central limit theorem. Expla- As the EV needs the same power P for driving on the road
nation of the central limit theorem can be found in Appendix A. regardless of battery pack I or II, the discharging rates of the cells
For a given electric vehicle with m n cells in a battery pack, for both battery packs are related as follows, if new m parallel
assuming that the packs energy capacity can supply the required branches are added to battery pack II,
power up to N charge/discharge cycle, then with the addition of m
m m n n m n redundant cells in the new battery i I 8
m m
pack, the maximum charge/discharge cycle N new , which the new
battery pack needs to supply the same required power, will be where I is the individual discharging current in the m n battery
given as follows, pack I. Similarly, with new n series branches, the cell discharging
rates relationship is
mnN
N new 7 n
m mn n i I 9
n n
Table 4 where g i;j ki;j represents the SoH of the cell (i, j) at level ki;j . Let
The reliability RGs Z 80% of the battery pack at 25 1C.
s inf{s: Gs ZW}, where W is the minimum user-set threshold
Cycle number 0.5 C 1C 1.5 C 2C demand value, the system can be divided into two disjoint subsets
of acceptable states {s, s 1,, 4} and unacceptable states {0, 1,,
100 1 1 1 1 s 1}. The reliability function R for a given user demand W can
200 1 1 1 1
then be written as,
300 1 1 1 1
400 0.9996 0.7330 0.0516 0.0004 4
500 0.8732 0.1139 0.0011 0 R P Gs Z W Pk 14
600 0.2082 0.0029 0 0 ks
700 0.0065 0 0 0
800 0.0001 0 0 0 where P(k) is the state probability of the battery pack at k level.
Table 6
The SoH value after 800 cycles, at 25 1C and 1 C discharge rate.
Table 5
The reliability RGs Z 80% of the battery pack at 50 1C.
SoH n 0 n 1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n 5
Cycle number 0.5 C 1C 1.5 C 2C
m 0 0 2 4 6 8 10
70.02% 75.39% 79.14% 81.90% 84.02% 85.69%
100 1 1 1 0.9998
m 1 5 8 11 14 17 20
200 1 0.9997 0.9225 0.3667
80.62% 84.02% 86.40% 88.17% 91.23% 92.14%
300 0.5965 0.0860 0.0033 0.0001
m 2 10 14 18 22 26 30
400 0 0 0 0
85.69% 88.17% 91.55% 92.65% 93.49% 94.16%
500 0 0 0 0
174 Z. Liu et al. / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 134 (2015) 169177
and thus
4.1. Reliability of the battery pack I U z 0z4 0:2082z3 0:7918z2 0z1 0z0 17
Sony 18650 with the capacity of 1.75 A h is used in this work, so Using Eqs. (13) and (14), where g i;j is from Eq. (13), we have
that the data in [17] can be employed. For illustration, the
RGs Z80% 0 0:2082 0:2082 18
Table 7
The SoH value after 500 cycles, at 50 1C and 1 C discharge rate.
Similar calculations can be performed for different cycle num-
SoH n 0 n 1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n 5 bers, temperature and C-rate, and the reliability of the battery
pack I are shown in Tables 4 and 5 at 25 1C and 50 1C, respectively.
m 0 0 2 4 6 8 10
58.68% 68.34% 74.57% 78.86% 82.88% 85.15%
m 1 5 8 11 14 17 20 4.2. Reliability of the battery pack II
76.90% 82.88% 86.08% 88.32% 89.96% 91.21%
m 2 To investigate the relationship between the battery pack relia-
85.15% 88.32% 90.41% 91.89% 92.98% 93.83%
bility and the active redundant cell number and conguration, we
consider two operating conditions for battery pack II. One is
charged/discharged for 800 cycles at 25 1C, and another one is
charged/discharged 500 cycles at 50 1C. In both conditions, the
discharge rate is 1 C in every parallel branch. The reason of choosing
the two operating conditions is that their reliabilities could be
improved signicantly with active cells redundancy.
We rst calculate the cells SoH of the battery pack according to
Eq. (6) for additional cells with different congurations. For exam-
ple, when m 1 and n 1, the mean SoH value after charging/
discharging for 800 cycles, at 25 1C and 1 C discharge rate can be
calculated as follows,
" 2
1 2 5 800
SoH 1 8:5 10 8 2:5 10 4
2 2 1 5 1
2 5 800
2 1 5 1
Fig. 9. The mean SoH of the battery pack w.r.t. the cell redundancy number. (For
interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred 2 5 1:75
7:26 10 2 0:8402 19
to the web version of this article.) 1:75 2 15 1
Table 8
The reliability by discharging 800 cycles, at 25 1C and 1 C discharge rate.
RGs Z 80% n 0 n 1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n 5
m 0 0 2 4 6 8 10
0 0.0002 0.0454 0.5600 0.9617 0.9993
m 1 5 8 11 14 17 20
0.6724 0.9983 1 1 1 1
m 2 10 14 18 22 26 30
1 1 1 1 1 1
Z. Liu et al. / Reliability Engineering and System Safety 134 (2015) 169177 175
Table 9
The reliability by discharging 500 cycles, at 50 1C and 1 C discharge rate.
RGs Z 80% n 0 n 1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n 5
m 0 0 2 4 6 8 10
0 0 0 0.0185 0.8008 0.9965
m 1 5 8 11 14 17 20
0.0336 0.9774 1 1 1 1
m 2 10 14 18 22 26 30
1 1 1 1 1 1
Fig. 10. The reliability with respect to the cell redundancy number.
Fig. 12. The reliability of different congurations at 50 1C. (a) 2 5 conguration;
(b) 2 8 conguration; (c) 3 5 conguration; (d) 2 9 conguration; (e) 3 6
conguration; (f) 2 10 conguration; (g) 4 5 conguration.
and 12. For example, when we need to design a battery pack, if the Q max new 2
2k1 N k2 N
1
k3 i
battery pack is to be reliable (R Z80%) after being charged/ 1
Q max new Q max new
discharged 800 times, we can select 3 6 conguration, which
demands a minimum cost. 1 k3 i
1 k1 N 2 k2 N
Therefore, during the design of high reliability Li-ion battery pack, 2 Q max new
we should consider both the conguration and the cell redundancy
number, as the relationship between the reliability, the cell number
and the conguration of the battery pack is non-trivial. A.2. Central limit theorem (CLT)
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