Repair-before-veto control for safe lithium-ion fast charging under unknown ambient and cooling-fault conditions

Abstract

Fast charging is decisive for electric-vehicle adoption, but field chargers are deployed as one setting while the cell's true thermal state, ambient temperature, and cooling-system health are uncertain. A current that is safe for a healthy cell at room temperature can overheat the same cell when it is hot or its cooling is degraded. We formulate this as a single-setting, unknown-state safe-fast-charging problem and solve it with a margin-aware repair-before-veto controller (RACL-B). RACL-B requests an aggressive current and repairs it online to the tightest measured margin among terminal voltage, cell temperature, and negative-electrode lithium-plating overpotential, rather than committing to a fixed schedule or shutting charging down. We evaluate one deployed setting across nine conditions, spanning 10/25/40 $^\circ$C ambient temperature and 100/60/40\% cooling health, in a high-fidelity Doyle--Fuller--Newman model with partially reversible lithium plating and lumped thermal coupling. Under a strict 45.0 $^\circ$C peak-temperature audit, fixed and ambient-scheduled protocols overheat in five of nine conditions because neither observes hidden cooling degradation, and rigid protective shutdown fails to deliver the charge in every condition. RACL-B safely completes all nine conditions, is 37.9\% faster than the fastest fixed current safe across the whole envelope, produces the least plated lithium, and remains safe across thermal guard bands. The same margin-aware principle drives a transient-credit fault readout (CREST-B) that, on a real introduced-fault battery-pack dataset, gives the strongest learned sequence-to-global monitor for localizing cooling-fault onset under operating-condition shift. The framework provides a deployable thermal-safety guarantee for fast charging together with a margin-aware monitor for the same physical fault class.