Early detection of failing aerospace batteries using gas sensors

• Main Author: Zhao, Chenhao
• Other Authors: Soong Boon Hee
• Format: Thesis-Master by Coursework
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/154398
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Nowadays, Lithium-ion battery (LIB) has been widely used in industry due to its properties of high power density, long life cycle, relatively low price, and so on. However, the safety of lithium-ion battery (LIB) applications should be concerned, especially for aerospace applications using large size and high energy density batteries. Suppose the battery is defective inside or outside. In that case, it can generate a large amount of heat and produce toxic and flammable gases, leading to serious safety risks such as fire and explosion. Most of the harmful gases are produced during the thermal runaway (TR) process, so it is necessary to detect battery failures before TR. After analyzing battery failure cases and referring to some authoritative experimental results, it is found that gas detection has a faster response speed than traditional voltage or temperature detection for early fault detection. In this project, a hydrogen gas detector is designed based on microcontroller PIC16F877A and gas sensor MQ-8. Its gas concentration measurement function is achieved from two aspects: hardware design and software design. In the hardware part, the signal acquisition circuit, LCD circuit, USB interface circuit, and clock circuit were designed. While in the software part, the main program, data acquisition program, data processing program, LCD program were developed. The experiment found that this detector can detect the target gas concentration in ppm quickly and accurately.