Speaker
Description
Solid-state batteries (SSBs) are a promising technology to overcome physicochemical limitations of the currently dominant battery technology, lithium-ion batteries with liquid electrolytes. However, the interaction between solid mechanics and electrochemical phenomena remains an unresolved challenge in these systems. To gain a deeper understanding, microstructure-resolved computational models that incorporate the relevant phenomena of solid mechanics and electrochemistry capture heterogeneities and their influence on local fields and global cell behavior, but yield large, strongly coupled systems of nonlinear partial differential equations. Efficient solution strategies are thus essential to make such simulations tractable on HPC platforms.
We first demonstrate the underlying physics relevant to an electro-chemo-mechanically coupled SSB model [1]. Then, we outline how the open-source multiphysics software framework 4C [2] can be used to efficiently solve microstructure-resolved SSB models by leveraging physics-oriented block preconditioning techniques implemented using the Trilinos [3] packages Teko, MueLu, and Ifpack, and the GMRES method adopted as linear solver. The preconditioning of the monolithic system of linear equations exploits the system's inherent block structure by dividing it into blocks corresponding to physical fields or areas with similar physical properties. This block structure is then preserved during preconditioning, enabling a tailored preconditioner setup for each block. We recently replaced an in-house block preconditioning implementation with Teko to reduce manual maintenance efforts and benefit from community developments, e.g., the transition to Tpetra for heterogeneous hardware architectures. Finally, we also briefly discuss issues we encountered during this process and suggest additional capabilities that might be helpful from a user perspective.
References
[1] Schmidt et. al. A three-dimensional finite element formulation coupling electrochemistry and solid mechanics on resolved microstructures of all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries, Comput. Method Appl. M. 417, 116468, 2023.
[2] 4C: A Comprehensive Multiphysics Simulation Framework, https://www.4c-multiphysics.org, 2026.
[3] M. Mayr et. al. Trilinos: Enabling Scientific Computing Across Diverse Hardware Architectures at Scale, arXiv:2503.08126, 2025.
