Regime-Aware Physics-Guided Early Warning of Lithium-Ion Battery Thermal Runaway Using Thermo-Mechanical Signals

Accurate prediction of thermal runaway in lithium-ion batteries is essential for ensuring the safety, efficiency, and reliability of modern energy storage systems. Conventional data-driven approaches, such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, can capture complex temporal dependencies but often violate thermodynamic principles, resulting in physically inconsistent predictions. Conversely, physics-based thermal models provide interpretability but are computationally expensive and difficult to parameterize for real-time applications. To bridge this gap, this study proposes a Physics-Informed Long Short-Term Memory (PI-LSTM) framework that integrates governing heat transfer equations directly into the deep learning architecture through a physics-based regularization term in the loss function. The model leverages multi-feature input sequences, including state of charge, voltage, current, mechanical stress, and surface temperature, to forecast battery temperature evolution while enforcing thermal diffusion constraints. Extensive experiments conducted on thirteen lithium-ion battery datasets demonstrate that the proposed PI-LSTM achieves an 81.9% reduction in root mean square error (RMSE) and an 81.3% reduction in mean absolute error (MAE) compared to the standard LSTM baseline, while also outperforming CNN-LSTM and multilayer perceptron (MLP) models by wide margins. The inclusion of physical constraints enhances the model's generalization across diverse operating conditions and eliminates non-physical temperature oscillations. These results confirm that physics-informed deep learning offers a viable pathway toward interpretable, accurate, and real-time thermal management in next-generation battery systems.

Reliable early detection of lithium-ion battery degradation requires health indicators that are physically interpretable and computable from routine cycler telemetry without access to the degradation region. We introduce \textsc{CausalHealth}, a framework that applies causal graph discovery and $k$-nearest-neighbour transfer entropy to per-cycle voltage, current, temperature, and resistance time series, and organises twelve resulting anomaly scores into three signal-class bundles (Magnitude-shift, Predictive-residual, Complexity-entropy) -- with Isolation Forest reported separately as it falls below the bundle reliability threshold -- to characterise detection sensitivity across ten commissioning fractions (5--30,%). The Magnitude-shift class achieves 100,% detection across all seven tested cells spanning LFP (MIT--Stanford MATR) and LCO (NASA PCoE, CALCE CS2) chemistries, with a lead time of up to 402 cycles before conventional capacity-threshold failure on gradual-fade cells. A Reliability-Weighted Master Health Index (RWMHI) -- a cross-bundle fusion of five high-reliability detectors weighted by inverse coefficient of variation -- improves lead time by 15--52 cycles over the class median on long-lived cells while maintaining 100,% detection. Validation against electrochemical impedance spectroscopy on an NMC prismatic cell provides independent physical grounding: transfer entropy $\mathrm{TE}(R \!\to\! V)$ correlates with charge-transfer resistance $R_{\mathrm{ct}}$ (pooled $r = +0.990$; temperature-controlled partial $r = +0.898$), and an Arrhenius analysis of both quantities yields an activation energy consistent with published NMC charge-transfer kinetics. These results are evaluated on seven cells across three benchmark datasets.

Accurate assessment of lithium-ion battery ageing is challenged by cell-to-cell variability, heterogeneous cycling protocols, and limited transferability of data-driven models across datasets. In particular, robust identification of degradation transitions, such as the knee point, and reliable early-life prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) remain open problems. This study proposes a unified framework for battery ageing analysis based on continuous representations of voltage-capacity and capacity-cycle trajectories learned from heterogeneous public datasets (NASA, CALCE, ISU-ILCC). The continuous formulation enables consistent extraction of degradation descriptors, including curvature, plateau length and knee-related metrics, while reducing sensitivity to dataset-specific discretisation. Across more than 250 cells, statistically significant correlations between knee onset and end-of-life (Pearson 0.75-0.84) are observed. Additional early-life analysis confirms that knee-related features retain predictive value when estimated from partial trajectories. Early-life models provide increasingly stable RUL predictions as the number of observed cycles increases, with meaningful predictive performance emerging within the first 5-20 cycles and remain robust under cross-dataset domain shift. The framework integrates continuous modelling, feature extraction and uncertainty-aware prediction, providing an interpretable and dataset-consistent approach demonstrating robustness across heterogeneous dataset types. Compared with conventional discrete or feature-based methods, the proposed representation reduces sensitivity to sampling resolution and improves cross-dataset consistency. The study is limited to laboratory-scale datasets and capacity-based end-of-life definitions.