Large-scale simulation of Li-ion battery systems for grid storage

Grid-scale lithium-ion batteries are becoming an increasingly integral part of our modern power system to support the proliferation of renewable energy sources. However, though rapidly declining prices and improving capabilities, they continue to remain as a significant portion of investment. Thus, their optimised operation is essential for increasing their economic viability. Despite that in the literature it is reported that high-fidelity battery models can step in to ameliorate the situation by providing more accurate performance predictions, the majority of studies have only focused on the behaviour of single lithium-ion cells, which means that the impact of system design and control on the long-term degradation and efficiency of a system containing thousands of cells has rarely been considered. It partly stems from the fact that simply combining advanced cell models may not scale well and require an immense computational power. In this work, we present our digital-twin software, SLIDE, developed to facilitate future research on large-scale battery storage system simulation. Our software is able to perform a multiphysics simulation of a MWh-size battery system containing tens of thousands of cells with individual physics-based models over its entire plausible lifetime.