Kinetic Modeling of Vent Gas Combustion During Battery Thermal Runaway and Inhibiting Effects of Additives

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tout en répondant à la demande mondiale en mobilité, en énergie et en produits pour la chimie.

Dans cet objectif, IFPEN développe des solutions permettant, d’une part, d’utiliser des sources d’énergie alternatives et, d’autre part, d’améliorer les technologies existantes liées à l’exploitation des énergies fossiles.

Kinetic Modeling of Vent Gas Combustion During Battery Thermal Runaway and Inhibiting Effects of Additives

Context

Electric vehicle is a promising solution to de-carbonization and massive deployment is foreseen. However, the safety concerns are obstructing their large-scale applications. One of the main safety concerns is the thermal runaway (TR) of batteries, which has caused many accidents around the globe. These accidents often lead to combustion and explosion, presenting grave dangers to human lives.

Induced by abuses of various types (e.g., deformation, overheating, internal short circuits, etc.), thermal runaway is driven by exothermic and chain-branching reactions between the battery materials, leading to rapid increase of temperature and pressure within the battery cell. As pressure reaches a certain threshold, the battery ruptures and releases gaseous compounds formed previously. Combustion could then happen easily as vent gas mixtures are usually highly flammable and ignition sources are abundant in the surroundings.

Currently, studies on vent gas combustion kinetics are limited. However, this kind of study could be important, as a better understanding of the combustion chemistry could provide insights on how to prevent combustion events when thermal runaway is inevitable or ongoing. One potential way is through additives (for example, conventional fire extinguisher such as halon and Novec 1230) in battery materials which could be released into gas phase to reduce the flammability of the mixture.

Therefore, this work aims to develop a kinetic mechanism to describe the combustion of the vent gas during battery thermal runaway and conduct kinetic modeling to evaluate the inhibiting effects of existing and potential additives.

Methodology

• Bibliography on vent gas combustion during battery thermal runaway: vent gas composition, kinetic mechanisms, existing and potential inhibiting additives, etc.
• Development of a kinetic mechanism (skeletal or detailed) for vent gas combustion with inhibiting kinetics of the identified additives.
• Kinetic modeling of vent gas combustion (using CHEMKIN) to evaluate its ignition delay, flame speeds, flammability limits, etc.
• Kinetic modeling and comparison of the inhibiting effects of the identified additives on vent gas combustion.

What you could acquire after the internship

• Knowledge on battery thermal runaway and gas-phase combustion chemistry
• Skills to perform kinetic modeling using CHEMKIN.

Requested profile and skills:

Level: Bac+4 or Bac+5

Aptitudes: Taste for research, dynamism and force of proposal, motivation for the valorization of results (writing of scientific articles), ability to work in a team

Interested ? Please send a letter of motivation and a CV to : boyang.xu@ifpen.fr

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