Sandia National Laboratories

Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) will develop a holistic safety framework, combining hierarchical material/cell level testing and mechanistic modeling to evaluate the safety of next-generation battery systems. The framework will facilitate a bottom-up understanding of battery safety, enabling battery developers to derisk promising chemistries from a safety perspective, reduce design iterations, and develop battery systems with a rigorous safety basis. For example, safety assessments early in battery development will analyze the underlying thermo-electrochemical reaction pathways and delineate safety descriptors such as critical thermal runaway temperatures, magnitudes of heat release, and toxicity of reaction products. Based on this data and analysis, SNL will develop a comprehensive physics-informed modeling framework to establish a safety map, spanning the materials to system scale. This collaborative effort will result in clear guidance on critical safety properties that can be used to classify, inform, and accelerate the development of next generation battery chemistries.