Despite the ever-increasing use across different sectors, the lithium-ion batteries (LiBs) have continually seen serious concerns over their thermal vulnerability. The LiB operation is associated with the heat generation and buildup effect, which manifests itself more strongly, in the form of highly uneven thermal distribution, for a LiB pack consisting of multiple cells. If not well monitored and managed, the heating may accelerate aging and cause unwanted side reactions. In extreme cases, it will even cause fires and explosions, as evidenced by a series of well-publicized incidents in recent years. To address this threat, this paper, for the first time, seeks to reconstruct the three-dimensional temperature field of a LiB pack in real time. The major challenge lies in how to acquire a high-fidelity reconstruction with constrained computation time. In this study, a three-dimensional thermal model is established first for a LiB pack configured in series. Although spatially resolved, this model captures spatial thermal behavior with a combination of high integrity and low complexity. Given the model, the standard Kalman filter is then distributed to attain temperature field estimation at substantially reduced computational complexity. The arithmetic operation analysis and numerical simulation illustrate that the proposed distributed estimation achieves a comparable accuracy as the centralized approach but with much less computation. This work can potentially contribute to the safer operation of the LiB packs in various systems dependent on LiB-based energy storage, potentially widening the access of this technology to a broader range of engineering areas.
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