Lithium-ion battery design fires in performance-based fire safety engineering: A review and scenario cluster framework

Lithium-ion battery fires differ fundamentally from conventional fuels and are not adequately addressed by current fire safety engineering methods using design fires. This work addresses this gap by systematically reviewing how battery design fires are currently constructed and used in fire safety engineering applications. Further on, the work presents a structured framework for defining and justifying battery fire scenario clusters as a logical step towards selection of application-specific design fires. The systematic literature review highlights recurring limitations in heat release rate scaling, representation of gas release and toxicity, treatment of battery-specific hazards, and access to validation data, with particularly scarce open literature for battery energy storage systems. To support more consistent scenario definition this work links credible battery failure modes to consequence paths and proposes battery scenario clusters characterized by ignition condition, gas release behavior, combustion regime, and dominant battery hazard type. Finally, the framework is positioned within performance-based design as a screening tool, complemented by guiding questions intended to make key assumptions and hazard transitions explicit before quantitative analysis.