Changelog
Follow new updates and improvements to Ionworks.
January 13th, 2025
PyBaMM v25.1 has now been released! This comes with several major contributions from the Ionworks team:
Geometric parameters as input parameters
Geometric parameters, such as electrode thickness and particle radius, can now be set to be input parameters that are specified at solve time. This contributes to supporting fast design optimization, since the simulation does not need to be rebuilt at each iteration. Note that this feature does not yet work with the standard PyBaMM models, and instead requires defining a custom model and mesh.
To demonstrate this, here is a trace from fitting the negative electrode thickness and negative particle radius to some synthetic data:
Standalone package and wheels for C/C++ solvers
The C/C++ solvers has been moved to a standalone repository, pybammsolvers. The wheels for this package are built separately from the rest of the PyBaMM code, which makes it easier to use the solvers during local development on any architecture.
Enhanced submodel cross-compatibility
Almost all submodel options are now cross-compatible. In particular, the following now all work well together: composite electrodes, degradation mechanisms (SEI, lithium plating, loss of active material), and particle size distribution.
January 5th, 2025
Parameterization Pipeline
When parameterizing your battery models using our battery parameterization software, you can now ensure that the optimizer finds the globally optimal solution, as well as providing an estimate of the uncertainty for each parameter being found.
This is made possible by the "multistart" and parameter sampling features. Optimization runs will be started from several randomly selected parameter values between the bounds you provide, and the solver will automatically return the best result, as well as a distribution for each parameter value based on all the results. Optimizations run in parallel, so you don't have to wait for hours for the results.
For existing users, simply set (e.g.) multistarts=50 to run 50 optimizations in parallel from 50 different starting points.
December 23rd, 2024
Studio
We have re-launched our cloud-based GUI, Ionworks Studio.
For version 1 of the re-release, our goal has been to get from zero to a simulation result in as few clicks as possible. Get started in three easy steps:
Create a cell with the right chemistry and capacity (you only need to do this once)
Choose an experiment and define its parameters (e.g. "constant current discharge" - 1C, 25°C, 100% initial SOC)
Run the simulation and visualize the results
You can easily set up sweeps over different experimental conditions to answer questions like "what is the effect of C-rate on discharge energy?" or "at what charge C-rate do I hit 0V anode potential?".
Finally, to celebrate the re-release, we posted a "12 days of electrochemical testing" series on LinkedIn, showcasing twelve different kinds of tests that can be simulated using Ionworks Studio, ranging from simple constant current discharge to peak power tests and EIS. You can read the full recap on our blog.