Early-Stage State-of-Health Prediction of Lithium Batteries for Wireless Sensor Networks Using LSTM and a Single Exponential Degradation Model

One of the most critical items from the reliability and the State-of-Health (SOH) point of view of wireless sensor networks is represented by lithium batteries. Predicting the SOH of batteries in sensor-equipped smart grids is crucial for optimizing energy management, preventing failures, and extending battery lifespan. Accurate SOH estimation enhances grid reliability, reduces maintenance costs, and facilitates the efficient integration of renewable energy sources. In this article, a solution for SOH prediction and the estimation of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of lithium batteries is presented. The approach was implemented and tested using two training datasets: the first consists of raw data provided by the Prognostics Center of Excellence at NASA, comprising 168 records, while the second is based on the curve fitting of the measured data using a single exponential degradation model. Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs) were trained using data from three different scenarios, where battery cycle consumption reached 30%, 50%, and 65% correspondingly. Various architectures and hyperparameters were explored to optimize the models' performance. The key finding is that training one of the models with only 50 records (equivalent to 30% of battery usage) enables accurate SOH prediction, achieving a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 1.68×10-4 and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 1.30×10-2. The best model trained with 110 records achieved an MSE of 2.51×10-5 and an RMSE of 5.01×10-3.