Engineering modeling of batteries

Abstract

Physico-chemical processes such as mass transport and electrochemical reactions, occur simultaneously in a battery during charge, discharge and open-circuit. These processes are strongly interacted with one another, and are also affected by electrical field distribution in the battery. Consequently the performance of a battery is significantly affected by battery design parameters. To determine the optimum design parameters for a specific application, traditional approaches have been proven to be costly and time-consuming because there are too many parameters. To gain better understanding of physico-chemical processes and their interactions in batteries and to effectively reduce the time for battery development, significant efforts have been made by the industries and research institutes to develop mathematical models for batteries from first principles. On June 10, 1994 Zhenhua Mao from Motorola has described a mathematical model for Ni/H ₂ cell and presented numerical results. The model, as described in [1], is based on simplified physical and geometric assumptions. The analysis of the more complete model remains a challenging problem.