Battery Safety & Materials

Battery safety is a critical factor to battery technology’s widespread adoption in the electric vehicle marketplace. Well-designed vehicle batteries enhance safety and support consumer confidence in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Sandia’s decades of experience in applied materials R&D, systems engineering, and battery abuse testing helps industry to implement advanced, science-based safety features.

Sandia’s battery safety and materials research couples a science-based understanding of electrochemical atomic and molecular processes with awareness of the macroscopic response of packaged batteries. We apply this expertise to mitigate safety concerns, extend battery lifetimes, and increase battery efficiency through three coordinated thrusts:

• Large-scale battery testing to measure critical thermochemical and thermophysical response phenomena that can provide detectable signatures of end-of-life degradation mechanisms,
• In-situ nano-scale characterization to gain an atomistic understanding of these mechanisms, and
• Multi-scale modeling, building predictive models linking atomistic processes with macroscopic responses.

These thrusts, using commercial materials and systems from industry partners, enable predictive simulations of battery performance to increase battery material capacity, lifetime, and safety.