Enhancing capacity estimation of retired electric vehicle lithium-ion batteries through transfer learning from electrochemical impedance spectroscopy

The low economic feasibility caused by inefficient testing and inaccurate performance estimation is one of the main bottlenecks in the echelon utilization of large-scale retired batteries. This study proposes a fast and accurate capacity estimation method for retired batteries based on electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). Firstly, the EIS of the batteries that experience multi-condition aging in the laboratory are collected. EIS characteristic parameter sequences highly related to battery performance, including real part and magnitude, are directly extracted to establish a base bi-directional long short-term memory model. Secondly, a transfer learning method based on feature matching is designed, which applies a linear transformation layer to map the features between the source and target domains. The proposed transfer learning method has been effectively validated on laboratory battery data measured at different temperatures and retired battery datasets of different material types. The improvements are especially notable for retired batteries. The detection time has been reduced, with each cell requiring only 1.67 min. And using only a small amount of data as input for transfer learning can achieve an accuracy improvement of over 90 %, indicating an effective transfer channel from the base model established on laboratory small-capacity battery aging data to large-capacity retired battery data is successfully established for the first time. For retired nickel-cobalt-manganese batteries, the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and the root mean square percentage error (RMSPE) are 2.33 % and 2.75 %, respectively, while for retired lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, the MAPE and RMSPE reached 4.12 % and 5.04 %, respectively. The results demonstrate the proposed method reduces the cost of repeated testing, modeling, and training for specific retired batteries while maintaining the accuracy of capacity estimation. This advancement helps to improve the efficiency of large-scale retired battery grading, and injects new momentum into facilitating more effective decision-making processes.