An Online Data-Driven Fault Diagnosis and Thermal Runaway Early Warning for Electric Vehicle Batteries

Battery fault diagnosis is crucial for stable, reliable, and safe operation of electric vehicles, especially the thermal runaway early warning. Developing methods for early failure detection and reducing safety risks from failing high energy lithium-ion batteries has become a major challenge for industry. In this article, a real-time early fault diagnosis scheme for lithium-ion batteries is proposed. By applying both the discrete Fréchet distance and local outlier factor to the voltage and temperature data of the battery cell/module that measured in real time, the battery cell that will have thermal runaway is detected before thermal runaway happens. Compared with the widely used single parameter based diagnosis approach, the proposed one considerably improve the reliability of the fault diagnosis and reduce the false diagnosis rate. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated with the operational data from electric vehicles with/without thermal runaway in daily use.