History-Agnostic Battery Degradation Inference

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have attracted widespread attention as an efficient energy storage device on electric vehicles (EV) to achieve emission-free mobility. However, the performance of LIBs deteriorates with time and usage, and the state of health of used batteries are difficult to quantify and to date are poorly understood. Having accurate estimations of a battery's remaining life across different life stages would benefit maintenance, safety, and serve as a means of qualifying used batteries for second-life applications. Since the full history of a battery may not always be available in downstream applications, in this study, we demonstrate a deep learning framework that enables dynamic degradation trajectory prediction, while requiring only the most recent battery usage information. Specifically, our model takes a rolling window of current and voltage time-series inputs, and predicts the near-term and long-term capacity fade via a recurrent neural network. We exhaustively benchmark our model against a naive extrapolating model by evaluating the error on reconstructing the discharge capacity profile under different settings. We show that our model's performance in accurately inferring the battery's degradation profile is "agnostic" with respect to cell cycling history and its current state of health.