Crack detection in lithium-ion cells using machine learning

It is an open question how the particle microstructure of a lithium-ion electrode influences a potential thermal runaway. In order to investigate this, information on the structural changes, in particular cracked particles, caused by the failure are desirable. For a reliable analysis of these changes a reasonably large amount of data is necessary, which necessitates automatic extraction of particle cracks from tomographic 3D image data. In this paper, a classification model is proposed which is able to decide whether a pair of particles is the result of breakage, of the image segmentation, or neither. The classifier is developed using simulated data based on a 3D stochastic particle model. Its validity is tested by applying the methodology to hand-labelled data from a real electrode. For this dataset, an overall accuracy of 73% is achieved. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.