Thermal propagation test of lithium-ion battery is an important method to verify the safety of battery system, and how to effectively trigger the thermal runaway of a cell and minimize the energy introduced into the system become the key of test method design. In this work, the influence of different heating area and different heating power on thermal runaway of prismatic cells and pouch cells is studied. The results show that when the heating area is fixed, the heating power increases, the heating time required to trigger the thermal runaway of the cells becomes shorter. The energy needed to be introduced becomes smaller, but there will be a minimum value of the introduced energy. On the other hand, the thermal runaway results of prismatic cells are more sensitive to the change of heating area, and the thermal runaway results of pouch cells are more sensitive to heating power.
