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Comment by buescher | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for posting this. PyBAMM is really slick. I first learned about it from a webinar on the competing Julia package.

I have to ask though, how many organizations are really designing their own cells for new products? And how much validation have these packages had? I know it's expensive and time-consuming to get a lot of battery discharge data. My experience may be overly coloring my thinking here - my idea of battery modeling involves a circuit simulator and only those effects that are not going to be drowned by the large tolerances in common batteries.

The one area where more detailed physical modeling would be interesting would be in long-term degradation and wear modeling for secondary cells. Is there a tutorial or example along those lines?

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Good question. I would say anyone developing new materials in a lab would benefit from the kind of physics-based models we have in PyBaMM. Organizations is a pretty broad term but I assume you mean companies in which case probably the number as a fraction of all companies dealing with batteries in some way is quite small, but the value of those companies is disproportionately large - think big car manufacturers and also companies dealing in more extreme environments like aerospace and also for heavy vehicles e.g. Fortescue who are electrifying their mining trucks. All the companies building cells and materials for cells doing cell design will certainly benefit from physical modelling. Validation of the packages is strong - PyBaMM has many peer reviewed citations. Validation of the numbers in the simulations for specific cells is probably weak and that's a real pain point in the industry that ionworks is working to address

I did some lab work at my university synthetizing materials for Li ion battery anodes as part of my honors thesis in Materials Engineering almost 15 years ago now.

My side of the project mostly concerned the method we were using to manufacture the materials (I was experimenting with a technique called "Electrostatic Spray Reductive Precipitation"). When it came to analyzing what I had managed to make it mostly involved using SEM (with EDS mapping) and XRD. At the time it never crossed my mind to look into possibility of simulations it would have saved a lot of time as doing the analysis was very time consuming.

For the theoretical side I was guided by a postgrad student who used a physics software package to predict the intercalation of Li ions using Density of States calculations, most of what he was doing went way over my head but it involved him running code and then telling me "we should try to make something like this..." so I imagine this sort of package could help out a lot here as well.

Also good point on degradation. Physics based modelling is invaluable for debugging this. PyBaMM does have quite a bit on degradation yes. Here's a good notebook to start with https://docs.pybamm.org/en/stable/source/examples/notebooks/...

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