Mass load prediction for lithium-ion battery electrode clean production: a machine learning approach

With the advent of sustainable and clean energy, lithium-ion batteries have been widely utilised in cleaner productions such as energy storage systems and electrical vehicles, but the management of their electrode production chain has a direct and crucial impact on the battery performance and production efficiency. To achieve a cleaner production chain of battery electrode involving strongly-coupled intermediate parameters and control parameters, a reliable approach to quantify the feature importance and select the key feature variables for predicting battery intermediate products is urgently required. In this paper, a Gaussian process regression-based machine learning framework, which incorporates powerful automatic relevance determination kernels, is proposed for directly quantifying the importance of four intermediate production feature variables and analysing their influences on the prediction of battery electrode mass load. Specifically, these features include three intermediate parameters from the mixing step and a control parameter from the coating step. After deriving four different automatic relevance determination kernels, the importance of these four feature variables based on a regression modelling is comprehensively analysed. Comparative results demonstrate that the proposed automatic relevance determination kernel-based Gaussian process regression models could not only quantify the importance weights for reliable feature selections but also help to achieve satisfactory electrode mass load prediction. Due to the data-driven nature, the proposed framework can be conveniently extended to improve the analysis and control of battery electrode production, further benefitting the manufactured battery yield, efficiencies and performance to achieve cleaner battery production.