Electro-chemo-mechanical simulation of 3D-microstructures for lithium-ion batteries

A micromodel coupling lithium-ion diffusion and electric potentials to a linear elasto-plastic model is applied. The resulting problem is discretized on a regular voxel grid with a finite-volume method and solved by an adaptive iterative scheme. The algorithm does not require the assembly of a Jacobian and applies the immersed interface method for the electrochemical problem. An established elastic solver optimized for non-linear heterogeneous structures is generalized to describe mechanical strains resulting from lithium-ion intercalation. Numerical examples on several structures are given, including academic structures and microstructures given by computer tomography compared to microstructures drawn from stochastic microstructure models. It is found that the structures drawn from the calibrated model resemble the mechanical properties of the structures gaind by tomographic imaging, which serves as an additional validation of the stochastic microstructure modeling approach.