Enabling Fast Internal Heating of Lithium-Ion Cells for Electric Vehicles Using Innovative Anode Electrodes With Integrated Resistance Wires

Lithium-ion batteries are widely used for a variety of applications, including electric vehicles (EV), but despite their high energy and power at normal operating conditions, their performance is affected by low temperatures. EV manufacturers use various methods, such as air heating and liquid heating, in order to maintain the batteries in operational temperatures. However, these methods require extended heating durations and high energy consumption, presenting a low uniformity in temperature across the cells in a battery pack. Herein, we propose a novel method which is based on cell internal heating and perform proof-of-concept heating and cycling tests. Heating tests performed on pouch cells showed that the external cell temperature can be increased from 0 °C to 15 °C in only 1.3 min, and from -20 °C to 10 °C in only 3.5 min, while heating from extremely low ambient temperatures of -40 °C up to 0 °C requires less than 7 min. Moreover, when cycled under C/2 and C/3 rates at 0 °C, the heated pouch cells were able to retain more than 90% of their nominal capacity after ~100 cycles, in contrary to standard cells, which suffered a 30% capacity loss after only 20 cycles.