The fire risk of portable batteries in their end-of-life: Investigation of the state of charge of waste lithium-ion batteries in Austria

The increased utilisation of lithium-ion batteries in the last years does not come without cost. Due to thermal runaway and exothermic degradation reactions, portable batteries pose enormous risks to waste management systems and infrastructure in their end-of-life phase. All over Europe, the number of waste fires caused by lithium-ion batteries are rising. The risk of a battery fire is mainly influenced by the probability and severity of a thermal runaway or exothermic degradation, which depends on the current state of charge (SOC) of the respective battery. In order to determine the distribution of the SOC which is one of the main influence factors to waste fires caused by lithium-ion batteries, 980 waste battery cells were representatively sampled, manually dismantled and analysed using a prototypic laboratory test stand. Approximately 24% of the analysed cells and batteries had a residual SOC of at least 25%, and approximately 12% had a residual SOC of at least 50%. Hence, approximately every fourth to eighth portable battery threatens to cause a waste fire when critically damaged. Furthermore, a distinct relationship between the actual cell voltage and the residual SOC was found for end-of-life portable batteries.