Lithium-Ion Technology: Balancing Increased System Capability with the Potential for Explosion

The push to increase the capability of satellites has driven significant increases in space battery performance over the past fifty years, progressing to the use of today’s state of the art technology: Lithium-ion. To date Lithium-ion batteries have flown on many missions and have demonstrated their tremendous potential to increase the capability of both large and small satellite technologies.However, recent events in the consumer electronics industry have highlighted the risk of this technology when handled improperly, and several factors are currently combining that increase both the likelihood and hazard of a battery failure: the larger size of spacecraft batteries in general, the push for ever greater energy density, and the shrinking infusion period both for payload and platform technologies. This paper discusses the necessary precautions that must be made to ensure safe use of Lithium-ion technology via the lessons learnt from a fifteen year Lithium-ion space battery program at ABSL. This program has yielded more than fifty successful launches and the space qualification of five Lithium based COTS cell technologies without a single safety incident