Experimental Study on Long Cycling Performance of NCM523 Lithium-Ion Batteries and Optimization of Charge-Discharge Strategy

With the increasing demand for clean renewable energy and electric cars, people have put forward higher requirement for the energy storage system. One of the most successful lithium-ion batteries with a cathode combination of lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (also called NCM lithium-ion battery), has been playing an increasingly important role. So far, numerous research has been done on the fabrication of cathode material with optimization of its composition, design, and assembly of the battery system in order to improve the energy storage performance. However, most of the previous studies were conducted based on relatively short cycling time of testing, with limited charge-discharge cycles of no more than 1000. Thus the conclusions were insufficient to be applied in the practical working condition. In this work, by using the developed NCM523 lithium-ion batteries, we have performed a series of ultra-long cycling tests on the individual cell and its module, with a comprehensive study on the relationship between the retained capacity after long cycling time and the depth of discharge (DOD), charge-discharge rate and operating temperature. Optimization of the charge-discharge strategies on a single cell and the whole module was also made to effectively improve the overall energy storage efficiency. This experimental study offers a guideline for the efficient use of similar types of lithium-ion batteries in the practical working condition. The developed batteries together with the optimized charge-discharge strategy proposed here are promising to meet the requirements for applications of stationary energy storage and electric cars.