Experimental Analysis of Capacity Degradation in Lithium-ion Battery Cells with Different Rest Times

This work presents the comparison of the variations in the electrical performance of two lithium-ion batteries during a cycling experiment. The experiment consists of a sequence of full charge/full discharge cycles, with constant current and constant voltage phases for the charge and the discharge. The main difference between the tests conducted over the two batteries is the rest time after charge in each cycle. For one battery, this time is one hour, while for the other one is one minute. The analysis is performed in terms of capacity, charge-discharge times, voltage evolution during the rest period and internal resistance. The results show that, in terms of the characteristics analyzed, there is not a considerable difference in the degradation behavior of the two batteries, which may mainly be due to the relatively-short length of the rest periods with respect the time constants related to phenomena, such as the capacity recovery.