Battery Safety & Materials

Safety is a critical factor to battery technology’s 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.

Sandia National Laboratories engineers June Stanley and Chris Grosso demonstrate how the drop tower they built abuses batteries to understand how the lithium-ion cells respond to different types of stress. (Photograph by Randy Montoya)
Sandia National Laboratories engineers June Stanley and Chris Grosso demonstrate how the drop tower they built abuses batteries to understand how the lithium-ion cells respond to different types of stress. (Photograph by Randy Montoya)
Two researchers stand in a lab, their faces lit by the screen and equipment in front of them
Sandia tests and predicts the safety of advanced batteries, including solid-state and lithium-metal. The goal is to create more affordable, convenient, efficient, and resilient electric vehicle batteries.

Additional Resources

United States Advanced Battery Consortium Battery Abuse Testing Manual for Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Applications, January 2022 (SAND2022-0089), https://doi.org/10.2172/1838583

Battery Abuse Testing Laboratory

Contact

Josh Lamb
batlab@sandia.gov