Toward high-accuracy and high-efficiency battery electrothermal modeling: A general approach to tackling modeling errors

An accurate control-oriented electrothermal model is a prerequisite for efficient thermal management of battery-powered applications. Despite the great efforts made to pursue high-accuracy modeling of the heat generation and transfer processes inside lithium-ion batteries for control purposes, little work has shed light on the error sources in such electrothermal modeling for obtaining an optimal model. In this article, we propose a practical and general framework for investigating the potential error sources in computationally efficient electrothermal modeling of large-format lithium-ion batteries. The results demonstrate that the high-accuracy modeling of the thermal interplay between two tabs and the cell body and the optimization of the temperature sensor placements should be given high priority. Further, the overpotential-based method is preferred to calculate the local generation rates of the battery body for accuracy and generalizability. This study provides important insights into accurate and computationally efficient electrothermal modeling for large-format energy storage batteries.