Timescale-aware surrogate-assisted multi-objective optimization of battery cell design for energy density, fast charging, and degradation

Battery cell design must balance energy density, fast charging, and degradation, yet these metrics evolve over different time scales and are costly to optimize jointly. We develop a timescale-aware surrogate-assisted framework that evaluates beginning-of-life volumetric energy density and 10–80% charging time together with state-of-health (SOH) loss over 200 cycles. Physics-based simulations of 1501 cell designs generate 1427 quality-controlled samples across 12 manufacturing-relevant parameters. Objective-specific surrogates support total-order Sobol analysis, which reveals distinct parameter rankings across the three metrics. A cross-objective rank-union strategy then retains variables influential to at least one objective before evolutionary Pareto optimization. Re-evaluation of the optimized candidates using the original physics-based models confirms designs that outperform the reference cell in all three metrics. Among these jointly improving candidates, the objective-wise best solutions, attained by different designs, can reduce SOH loss by 99.31%, increase volumetric energy density by 12.49%, and shorten charging time by 28.73%. The framework makes Pareto exploration across disparate electrochemical timescales computationally tractable, thereby enabling systematic multi-objective optimization of battery cell design.