Li-ion Battery Aging with Hybrid Physics-Informed Neural Networks and Fleet-wide Data

Lithium-ion batteries are commonly used to power electric unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs).Therefore, the ability to model both the state of charge as well as battery health is very important for reliable and affordable operation of UAV fleets.Even though models based on first principles are accurate and trustworthy, the complex electro-chemistry that governs battery discharge and aging makes it hard to build and use such models for in-time monitoring of battery conditions.Moreover, the careful tuning or estimation of high-fidelity model parameters hampers the straightforward deployment in the field.Alternatively, reduced order models have the advantage of capturing the overall behavior of battery discharge. Reduced-order principle-based models are built by carefully simplifying the physics/chemistry such that computational cost is dramatically reduced while the overall behavior of the system is still captured.These simplifications also lead to a number of parameters to be estimated based on data as well as residual discrepancy (model-form uncertainty).This approach can lead to a number of parameters to be estimated based on data as well as residual model-form uncertainty; a property shared with machine learning models. The latter are solely built on the basis of data, and can still capture unexpected nonlinearities.The drawback is that traditional machine learning tends to require large number of data points hard to retrieve in many scientific and engineering fields like, for example, the field of battery discharge and degradation prediction. In this paper, we will present a hybrid modeling approach for tracking and forecasting battery aging based on ``as-used'' conditions.Our approach directly implements a reduced-order model based on Nerst and Butler-Volmer equations within a deep neural network framework.While most of the input-output relationship is captured by reduced-order models, the data-driven kernels reduce the gap between predictions and observations.The hybrid model estimates the overall battery discharge, and a multilayer perceptron models the battery internal voltage.Battery aging is characterized by time-dependent internal resistance and the amount of available Li-ions.We address the difficult issue of building and updating the aging model by reducing the need for reference discharge cycles.This is beneficial to operators, since it reduces the need of taking the batteries out of commission.We compensate for lack of reference discharge cycles by using a probabilistic model that leverages previously available fleet-wide information. We validate our approach using data publicly available through the NASA Prognostics Center of Excellence website.Results showed that our hybrid battery prognosis model can be successfully calibrated, even with a limited number of observations.Moreover, the model can help optimizing battery operation by offering long-term forecast of battery capacity.