Lithium-ion battery utilization in various modes of e-transportation

Abstract

The electrification of the transportation sector leads to an increased deployment of lithium-ion batteries in vehicles. Today, traction batteries are installed, for example, in electric cars, electric buses, and electric boats. These use-cases place different demands on the battery. In this work, simulated data from 60 electric cars and field data from 82 electric buses and six electric boats from Germany are used to quantify a set of stress factors relevant to battery operation and life expectancy depending on the mode of transportation. For this purpose, the open-source tool SimSES designed initially to simulate battery operation in stationary applications is extended toward analyzing mobile applications. It now allows users to simulate electric vehicles while driving and charging. The analyses of the three means of transportation show that electric buses, for example, consume between 1 and 1.5 kWh/km and that consumption is lowest at ambient temperatures around 20 °C. Electric buses are confronted with 0.4–1 equivalent full cycle per day, whereas the analyzed set of car batteries experience less than 0.18 and electric boats between 0.026 and 0.3 equivalent full cycles per day. Other parameters analyzed include mean state-of-charges, mean charging rates, and mean trip cycle depths. Beyond these evaluations, the battery parameters of the transportation means are compared with those of three stationary applications. We reveal that stationary storage systems in home storage and balancing power applications generate similar numbers of equivalent full cycles as electric buses, which indicates that similar batteries could be used in these applications. Furthermore, we simulate the influence of different charging strategies and show their severe impact on battery degradation stress factors in e-transportation. To facilitate widespread and diverse usage, all profile and analysis data relevant to this work is provided as open data as part of this work.