ORNL uses HPC to model battery aging

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has announced research using high performance computing and physics-based modeling to analyze battery aging and improve the design of megawatt-hour grid storage systems.

• ORNL researchers are coupling HPC with a physics-based modeling framework to evaluate how operating strategies affect battery aging over 500-1,000 cycles, with results in days instead of weeks.
• The model scales from cell-level to module- and pack-level performance, simulates more than 10,000 cells at once, and is intended to optimize electrical architecture, control strategies, and operating schedules; the work was funded by DOE’s Office of Electricity and supports the Genesis Mission.
• The research found different degradation pathways for frequency regulation versus energy-cost reduction use cases, and noted that low-voltage systems showed more aging variation than high-voltage systems.
• The team received a Best Paper Award at the IEEE Electrical Energy Storage Application and Technologies Conference earlier this year for the work describing the project.