Investigating the Aging Effect of Current Ripple on Lithium-Ion Cells

We have built an experimental setup which exposes twelve cells to a well-defined ripple current. It consists of a system for cycling high capacity cells in parallel with a triangular current waveform superimposed on top of the direct current. The frequency of the waveform is variable up to 50 Hz, and the sum of the DC and AC components can have a magnitude of -40 A to 40 A. Current is measured over a 500 µΩ shunt resistor. The voltage and current of each cell is read simultaneously at a sample rate up to 4 MS/s, allowing for precise impedance measurements even for high frequency harmonics. The cells are cycled at 40 °C. The experiment has been designed to eliminate indirect effects of the AC harmonics as far as possible. This system is being used to test whether or not AC harmonics affect Li-ion aging.