PulseBat: A field-accessible dataset for second-life battery diagnostics from realistic histories using multidimensional rapid pulse test

As electric vehicles (EVs) approach the end of their operational life, their batteries retain significant economic value and present promising opportunities for second-life use and material recycling. This is particularly compelling for Global South and other underdeveloped regions, where reliable energy storage is vital to addressing critical challenges posed by weak and even nonexistent power grid and energy infrastructures. However, despite this potential, widespread adoption has been hindered by critical uncertainties surrounding the technical performance, safety, and recertification of second-life batteries. In cases where they have been redeployed, mismatches between estimated and actual performance often render batteries technically unsuitable or hazardous, turning them into liabilities for communities they were intended to benefit. This considerable misalignment exacerbates energy access disparities and undermines the broader vision of energy justice, highlighting an urgent need for robust and scalable solutions to unlock the potential. In the PulseBat Dataset, the authors tested 464 retired lithium-ion batteries, covering 3 cathode material types, 6 historical usages, 3 physical formats, and 6 capacity designs. The pulse test experiments were performed repeatedly for each second-life battery with 10 pulse width, 10 pulse magnitude, multiple state-of-charge, and state-of-health conditions, e.g., from 0.37 to 1.03. The PulseBat Dataset recorded these test conditions and the voltage response as well as the temperature signals that were subject to the injected pulse current, which could be used as a valuable data resource for critical diagnostics tasks such as state-of-charge estimation, state-of-health estimation, cathode material type identification, open-circuit voltage reconstruction, thermal management, and beyond.

Non-destructive Degradation Pattern Decoupling for Ultra-early Battery Prototype Verification Using Physics-informed Machine Learning

Manufacturing complexities and uncertainties have impeded the transition from material prototypes to commercial batteries, making prototype verification critical to quality assessment. A fundamental challenge involves deciphering intertwined chemical processes to characterize degradation patterns and their quantitative relationship with battery performance. Here we show that a physics-informed machine learning approach can quantify and visualize temporally resolved losses concerning thermodynamics and kinetics only using electric signals. Our method enables non-destructive degradation pattern characterization, expediting temperature-adaptable predictions of entire lifetime trajectories, rather than end-of-life points. The verification speed is 25 times faster yet maintaining 95.1% accuracy across temperatures. Such advances facilitate more sustainable management of defective prototypes before massive production, establishing a 19.76 billion USD scrap material recycling market by 2060 in China. By incorporating stepwise charge acceptance as a measure of the initial manufacturing variability of normally identical batteries, we can immediately identify long-term degradation variations. We attribute the predictive power to interpreting machine learning insights using material-agnostic featurization taxonomy for degradation pattern decoupling. Our findings offer new possibilities for dynamic system analysis, such as battery prototype degradation, demonstrating that complex pattern evolutions can be accurately predicted in a non-destructive and data-driven fashion by integrating physics-informed machine learning.