Attention towards chemistry agnostic and explainable battery lifetime prediction

Abstract Predicting and monitoring battery life early and across chemistries is a significant challenge due to the plethora of degradation paths, form factors, and electrochemical testing protocols. Existing models typically translate poorly across different electrode, electrolyte, and additive materials, mostly require a fixed number of cycles, and are limited to a single discharge protocol. Here, an attention-based recurrent algorithm for neural analysis (ARCANA) architecture is developed and trained on an ultra-large, proprietary dataset from BASF and a large Li-ion dataset gathered from literature across the globe. ARCANA generalizes well across this diverse set of chemistries, electrolyte formulations, battery designs, and cycling protocols and thus allows for an extraction of data-driven knowledge of the degradation mechanisms. The model’s adaptability is further demonstrated through fine-tuning on Na-ion batteries. ARCANA advances the frontier of large-scale time series models in analytical chemistry beyond textual data and holds the potential to significantly accelerate discovery-oriented battery research endeavors.