Smart Battery Cell Housings through Additive Manufacturing - Potentials and Challenges

To meet the high requirements and the increasing demand for battery storage systems in the future, attributes such as performance, safety, and lifetime must be improved. One approach for gaining more knowledge about the behavior of battery cells and facilitating those improvements is the addition of sensors on battery cell level. Sensors enable condition monitoring of physical parameters such as temperatures and cell expansions through volume changes, which can be beneficial especially during early development stages for new cell designs. In this paper, existing research on adding different types of sensors to battery cells is summarized. Based on these findings, a novel perspective for adding sensors is presented, whereby sensors are integrated directly into the cell housing using the layer-by-layer technology additive manufacturing. This approach allows the encapsulation of the sensor in the solid housing material and prevents contact with the chemically aggressive electrolyte or other environmental influences. Furthermore, sensor integration in the housing of battery cells does not affect the cell chemistry, which improves the transfer from product development to serial use, potentially without sensor, compared to existing approaches. From this perspective, the potentials and challenges of implementing smart battery cell housings through additive manufacturing are described and the conceptual framework for future investigations is outlined.