SBIR-STTR Award

CAMX Power is proposing to develop a real-time early warning fault indication system for Navy Li-ion batteries to significantly enhance the safety of these batteries and hence allow them to be deployed in a wide range of Navy applications. CAMX Powers novel fault detection technology with built-in redundancy will not only provide immediate warning of failures-in-progress but also provide early detection, well in advance of the point of failure, of latent faults present in cells that could lead to thermal runaway or other hazardous conditions in a battery. Such early warning can enable activation of intervention measures to reduce the risk of catastrophic and violent failures.

Benefit:
Widespread deployment of high energy density Li-ion batteries in Military (e.g., underwater unmanned vehicles) and Civilian applications (e.g., electric drive vehicles) is limited by safety concerns. The CAMX Power early fault warning technology being developed in this project can enhance the safety of the Li-ion battery pack and reduce the risk of catastrophic failures. The improved safety profile of Li-ion batteries can enable their use in diverse military and civilian applications.

Keywords:
lithium battery, lithium battery, lithium battery fault detection, Li-ion battery safety, early detection,, UUV battery, thermal runaway, Fault detection

CAMX Power is proposing to develop a real-time early warning fault indication system for Navy Li-ion batteries to significantly enhance the safety of these batteries and hence allow them to be deployed in a wide range of applications. Our Phase I effort showed that the CAMX Power Early Warning Fault Detection Technology for Li-ion batteries is well suited to redundant implementation for added security for personnel, equipment, and missions. It further demonstrated high-performance implementations suitable for monitoring battery systems based on large numbers of cells such as UUV batteries. We demonstrated how our technology can implement the features of early stage internal short detection, combined with new capabilities of fail-open, fail-short, and dual-failure mode detection, and further demonstrated that our technology can identify failures in lithium-ion cells and battery packs before such faults grow to sufficient severity to trigger thermal runaway and potential cascading to other cells. CAMX Power is pleased to propose a Phase II Program that will build upon these early warning capabilities that can be rendered in robust implementations with built-in redundancies in sensing network, power sourcing, and data processing, for reliable battery monitoring and sensitive detection of internal faults in any cell of the battery.

Benefit:
Anticipated benefits to the Navy of the proposed technology include (1) improved safety and reliability profile for lithium-ion energy storage platforms for added security for personnel, equipment, and mission and (2) detailed battery state-of-health tracking for better service life prognostics and reduced total cost of ownership for energy storage systems.

Keywords:
Early warning fault detection, Safety, internal short circuit, lithium-ion, safety monitoring, State-of-Health