The degradation of lithium-ion cells with respect to increases of internal resistance (IR) has negative implications for rapid charging protocols, thermal management and power output of cells. Despite this, IR receives much less attention than capacity degradation in Li-ion cell research. Building on recent developments on ‘knee’ identification for capacity degradation curves, we propose the new concepts of ‘elbow-point’ and ‘elbow-onset’ for IR rise curves, and a robust identification algorithm for those variables. We report on the relations between capacity’s knees, IR’s elbows and end of life for the large dataset of the study. We enhance our discussion with two applications. We use neural network techniques to build independent state of health capacity and IR predictor models achieving a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 0.4% and 1.6%, respectively, and an overall root mean squared error below $0.0061$. A relevance vector machine, using the first 50 cycles of life data, is employed for the early prediction of elbow-points and elbow-onsets achieving a MAPE of 11.5% and 14.0%, respectively.

Lithium-ion batteries have found applications in many parts of our daily lives. Predicting their remaining useful life (RUL) is thus essential for management and prognostics. Most approaches look at early life prediction of RUL in the context of designing charging profiles or optimising cell design. While critical, said approaches are not directly applicable to the regular testing of cells used in applications. This article focuses on a class of models called ‘one-cycle’ models which are suitable for this task and characterized by versatility (in terms of online prediction frameworks and model combinations), prediction from limited input, and cells’ history independence. Our contribution is fourfold. First, we show the wider deployability of the so-called one-cycle model for a different type of battery data, thus confirming its wider scope of use. Second, reflecting on how prediction models can be leveraged within battery management cloud solutions, we propose a universal Exponential-smoothing (e-forgetting) mechanism that leverages cycle-to-cycle prediction updates to reduce prediction variance. Third, we use this new model as a second-life assessment tool by proposing a knee region classifier. Last, using model ensembling, we build a “model of models”. We show that it outperforms each underpinning model (from in-cycle variability, cycle-to-cycle variability, and empirical models). This ‘ensembling’ strategy allows coupling explainable and black-box methods, thus giving the user extra control over the final model.