Bridging battery design and health assessment through virtual sensing and physics-informed learning

Abstract

Supercharging of lithium-ion batteries (LiBs) requires robust health monitoring to ensure durability, safety, and user confidence, particularly for emerging vehicle-to-grid applications with bidirectional energy flows. Yet battery management remains largely disconnected from the material and structural origins of aging, limiting both interpretable health assessment and informed battery design. Here we propose a physics-informed learning framework with virtual sensing that infers hard-to-measure design parameters, including solid-state diffusion coefficient, electrode thickness, ion concentration, and particle size, directly from standard battery management system (BMS) measurements. Across diverse fast-charging strategies and driving profiles, embedding a digital-twin-derived particle-cracking mechanism as a soft constraint reduces trajectory and lifetime prediction errors by 6-8 times relative to state-of-the-art machine learning baselines using only 2% early-life observations. We further show that accurate degradation extrapolation does not require fully resolved governing equations; validated partial mechanisms, jointly refined with limited data, provide sufficient guidance. Virtual sensing transforms standard charging signals into latent design variables without additional sensors, bridging observable battery behavior and underlying aging processes while reducing capacity loss error by up to 39%, end-of-life (EOL) error by 17%, and prediction variability by up to 54%, enabling real-time exploration of new battery configurations. More broadly, the proposed framework establishes a practical feedback loop between deployment and development, demonstrating how real-world operation can continuously inform upstream design decisions across complex multiphysics systems.