Safety Assessment of Electrical Energy Storage System

This thesis wants to cover some of the lack left by the Electric Energy Storage systems’ technical standards, since today these documents prescribe mostly Qualitative Risk Assessment’s techniques to address the Li-ion’s batteries’ Thermal Runaway’s issue and its correlated accidents like fire, toxic dispersion, and explosion. The normative and legislative framework proves to be delayed respect to the available market’s solutions. This is contributing to an increasing of the Electric Energy Storage systems’ accidents worldwide in parallel with the large-scale deployment of this technology that is dictated by the needs to reduce CO2 emissions in the next decades. This document proposes a computational fluid dynamics’ simulation of a Li-ion battery module’s fire with the help of Fire Dynamic Simulator’s software. An attempt to model the events that characterize the initial stage of the Thermal Runaway’s failure mode has been carried out. The outcomes demonstrate that the Heat Releasing Rate’s curve’s is highly cautionary while the Thermal Runaway’s propagation is not truthful. More reliable and easily accessible testing data could improve the CFD outcomes making more robust the Hazard Mitigation Analysis during the Compliance phase of these storage systems. The effect would be a reduction of the number of incidents worldwide and a decreasing of the damages’ severity associated to these events.