The transition to renewable energy systems and electric mobility depends on the effectiveness, reliability, and durability of lithium-ion battery technology. Accurate modeling and control of battery systems are essential to ensure safety, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness in electric vehicles and grid storage. In engineering and materials science, battery models depend on physical parameters such as capacity, energy, state of charge (SOC), internal resistance, power, and self-discharge rate. These parameters are affected by measurement uncertainty. Despite the widespread use of lithium-ion cells, few studies quantify how measurement uncertainty propagates to derived battery parameters and affects predictive modeling. This study quantifies how uncertainty in voltage, current, and temperature measurements reduces the accuracy of derived parameters used for simulation and control. This work presents a comprehensive uncertainty analysis of 18650 format lithium-ion cells with nickel cobalt aluminum oxide (NCA), nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC), and lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathodes. It applies the law of error propagation to quantify uncertainty in key battery parameters. The main result shows that small variations in voltage, current, and temperature measurements can produce measurable deviations in internal resistance and SOC. These findings challenge the common assumption that such uncertainties are negligible in practice. The results also highlight a risk for battery management systems that rely on these parameters for control and diagnostics. The results show that propagated uncertainty depends on chemistry because of differences in voltage profiles, kinetic limitations, and temperature sensitivity. This observation informs cell selection and testing for specific applications. Improved quantification and control of measurement uncertainty can improve model calibration and reduce lifetime and cost risks in battery systems. These results support more robust diagnostic strategies and more defensible warranty thresholds. This study shows that battery testing and modeling should report and propagate measurement uncertainty explicitly. This is important for data-driven and physics-informed models used in industry and research.

Electrochemical aging can alter the mechanical abuse tolerance of lithium-ion cells, but evidence for large-format tabless cylindrical cells remains limited. This study investigates commercial steel-cased 4695 cells under quasi-static hemispherical indentation at 100% State-of-Charge. Fresh cells were compared with two aged groups brought to 80% remaining capacity by either room-temperature cycling at 20 °C and 20 A or low-temperature/high-current cycling at −10 °C and 45 A. Aging shifted the onset of a major internal short circuit to lower displacement, force, and absorbed mechanical work. Relative to fresh cells, the mean displacement at internal short-circuit onset decreased by 15.9% after aging at 20 °C and 20 A and by 22.1% after aging at −10 °C and 45 A, while the corresponding force decreased by 10.8% and 19.4%. The absorbed mechanical work to short-circuit onset decreased by 24.0% and 37.3%, respectively. Peak surface temperatures did not clearly separate the groups, whereas integrating the surface-temperature rise over the first 30 $\mathrm{s}$ after short-circuit onset revealed an increase from 6894 $\mathrm{K}$$\mathrm{s}$ in fresh cells to 9872 $\mathrm{K}$$\mathrm{s}$ and 13,777 $\mathrm{K}$$\mathrm{s}$ in the two aged groups. The experiments also revealed a change in observed venting behavior, with top-terminal venting occurring more frequently in aged cells. These results indicate that, under the tested conditions, aging history can reduce mechanical abuse tolerance and modify post-failure severity in large-format cylindrical cells.

Indentation and crush tests are widely used as crash-relevant surrogates for mechanical intrusion in Lithium-Ion Batteries (LIBs), yet their interpretation still relies on macroscopic, binary pass/fail criteria established at the Beginning of Life (BoL). This neglects how calendar and cyclic degradation alter a cell’s mechanical, thermal, and structural state before abuse, leaving the literature on aged cells apparently contradictory. This review establishes an aging-aware interpretive framework that separates three levels commonly conflated: the boundary conditions governing deformation, the study-specific criteria and evidence strength behind a declared electrical event, and the post-trigger hazard progression captured within the available monitoring window. A descriptive synthesis of 22 normalized fresh-to-aged comparisons from 13 primary studies shows no universal aging-driven shift of the reported comparison event toward earlier or later force–displacement states, with force and displacement changing in the same direction in only about half of the cases. An apparent format-associated displacement pattern is substantially attenuated when the pouch-cell displacement ratios are normalized by the respective initial cell thicknesses: the pouch-cell median displacement ratio decreases from 1.07 to approximately 1.00, and the remaining variation differs across aging routes and states of charge, although their individual contributions cannot be separated in the available dataset. Many apparent contradictions likewise stem from non-equivalent mechanical boundary conditions and trigger definitions, and continuity of confinement—especially for pouch cells aged under stack pressure and tested in a relaxed state—is identified as a frequently overlooked interpretive variable, although no controlled aged-cell study has yet isolated its contribution. An earlier-reported trigger does not necessarily imply a more severe outcome. We distill these requirements into a tier-resolved reporting checklist, providing a more rigorous and reusable basis for abuse-test interpretation, model development, and safety qualification of batteries intended for long service life and second-life deployment.

Pouch cells in automotive modules age and may experience mechanical abuse while mechanically confined, yet almost all published comparisons of fresh and aged cells release the aging constraint before the abuse test. In the present work, three commercial 6 Ah pouch cells were electrochemically cycled to approximately 80% State of Health inside a spring-loaded flat-plate fixture initialized at a nominal average stack pressure of $0.11$ $\mathrm{M}$$\mathrm{Pa}$ and were then indented quasi-statically at nominally 100% State of Charge without releasing the confinement. Three uncycled cells were tested as fresh references in the corresponding fixture configuration. The aging state was tracked by capacity fade and Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy. The aged cells built up force earlier, reaching 20 $\mathrm{k}$$\mathrm{N}$ at 11% smaller intrusion, and the electrically detected Internal Short Circuit occurred at 18% lower displacement and at a 10% lower group-mean force, while peak force and displacement at peak remained within the observed cell-to-cell scatter. This differs from the right shift reported for many pouch-cell studies in which the aging constraint was released before testing and resembles the earlier onsets reported for hard-cased cylindrical cells. Following the electrically detected Internal Short Circuit onset, the aged-cell voltage reached 1 $\mathrm{V}$ later than that of the fresh references. The results are consistent with confinement history being a contributing and experimentally controllable variable in abuse tests on aged cells.