Automatic Data Curation and Analysis Pipeline for Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy Measurements Conducted on Solid Oxide Cell Stacks
Authors: Mänken Christian Frederik , Schäfer Dominik , Eichel Rudiger-A , Kunz Felix 
Published: September 2023

Abstract

To better understand degradation in electrochemical converters and helping to correlate certain phenomena with specific operating conditions, machine learning (ML) methods are increasingly being applied. Success has already been achieved in the field of degradation analysis and prediction of capacity of lithium ion batteries1, for instance. In terms of Solid Oxide Cell (SOC) stacks ML methods have been applied mainly with the aim of identification of faulty operation modes and degradation related fault diagnosis2. ML approaches usually require a considerable amount of real training data, when used for forecasting models. A data consolidation and curation strategy was developed with the aim of processing the historic long-term test bench data of SOCs collected by Forschungszentrum Jülich over the past years. In comparison to other datasets developed in this field3, the one presented in this work contains SOC stack tests in fuel cell operation with significantly longer operating times under load. A compilation of the sample experiments and the consolidation into a hierarchical data format are presented. Further, an essential part of the strategy is the automatic curation and analysis of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements, using a specifically developed procedure in Python. The varying quality of measurements from past years, as well as recurring artefacts such as parasitic inductances, can be addressed in this way. Additional distribution of relaxation times (DRT) deconvolutions and equivalent circuit modelling (ECM) are performed, as part of the procedure to automatically retrieve feature values from measurements (cf. Fig. 1). The novel dataset, which to the authors’ knowledge includes some of the longest SOC stack tests available, serves as the basis for several evaluations. In addition to classification and clustering work to derive degradation patterns, in particular based on the EIS data, another focus is on the development of forecasting models. The current work is primarily concerned with long short-term memory (LSTM), as well as regression models that make use of both the time series data and the characterisation measurements, such as EIS.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank their colleagues at Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH for their great support and the Helmholtz Society as well as the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research for financing these activities as part of the WirLebenSOFC project (03SF0622B).

References

1: Jones, P.K., Stimming, U. & Lee, A.A. Impedance-based forecasting of lithium-ion battery performance amid uneven usage. Nature Communications 13, 4806 (2022).

2: B. Yang et al. Solid oxide fuel cell systems fault diagnosis: Critical summarization, classification, and perspectives. Journal of Energy Storage 34, 102153 (2021).

3: A.K. Padinjarethil, S. Pollok & A. Hagen. Degradation studies using machine learning on novel solid oxide cell database. Fuel Cells 21, 566–576 (2021).

Figure caption: Fig.1: Flow diagram of EIS data curation pipeline and curation results for example EIS measurement.

Figure 1