On the behaviour of the lithium ion battery in the HEV application

Abstract: The lithium ion battery is today mainly used in cell phonesand laptops. In the future, this kind of battery might beuseful in hybrid electric vehicles as well.In this work, the main focus has been to gain more knowledgeabout the lithium ion battery in the hybrid electric vehicle(HEV) and more precisely to examine what processes of thebattery that are limiting at HEV currents. Both experiments andmathematical modelling have been used. In both cases, highrate, pulsed currents typical for the HEV, have been used.Two manuscripts have been written. Both of them concern thebehaviour of the battery at HEV load, but from different pointsof view. The first one concerns the electrochemical behaviourof the battery at different ambient temperatures. Theexperimental results of this paper were used to validate amathematical model of a Li-ion battery. Possiblesimplifications of the model were identified. In this work itwas also concluded that the mass transfer of the electrolyte isthe main limiting process within the battery. The mass transferof the electrolyte was further studied in the second paper,where the concentration of lithium ions was measured indirectlyusing in situ Raman spectroscopy. This study showed that themathematical description of the mass transfer of theelectrolyte is not complete. One main reason of this issuggested to be the poor description of the physical parametersof the electrolyte. These ought to be further studied in orderto get a better fit between concentration gradients predictedby experiments and model respectively.