Connecting Vehicle Requirements with Battery Design and Testing: Linking Drive Cycles with Material Properties

Traditional testing approaches for fundamental battery materials focus on highly artificial test profiles, for example constant current (CC) or constant voltage (CV) testing. Additionally, the currents used for capacity and cycle tests are often very low. These profiles are not indicative of the types of current/voltage profiles that the battery will experience during actual vehicle operation. As a result, these simple tests may fail to sufficiently elicit the reduction in performance and failure modes that occur during more dynamic cycling.

In this paper, we outline an approach in which vehicle-level modeling is applied to regulatory drive cycles in order to derive power vs. time requirements for an energy storage system. These requirements are used to identify segments of the regulatory drive cycles that present significant challenges to the battery. Finally, the most stressing portions of the drive cycle are used to determine limiting physical characteristics of batteries. This approach allows us to accelerate materials testing and understand the potential benefits of novel materials when used on regulatory and other drive cycles.