Holistic strategies for next-generation battery safety: From advanced materials to full-cell manufacturing and safety management

Battery safety is a cross-scale property that cannot be inferred from a single material test or from the absence of electrolyte flammability. This critical review reorganizes recent evidence around a common failure sequence linking local electrochemical instability, interfacial heat and gas generation, separator or structural failure, internal short circuit, thermal runaway, and module propagation. The literature is classified by validation scale and by the strength of the underlying evidence, and observations are separated explicitly from mechanistic interpretation and engineering extrapolation. Across chemistries, five conclusions emerge. First, safety claims are only comparable when state of charge, cell format and capacity, electrolyte inventory, trigger protocol, thermal boundary conditions, and normalization basis are reported. Second, mitigation must be matched to the failure stage: interphase and materials design reduce the earliest heat sources, while barriers, vent management, cooling, and isolation primarily limit consequences after runaway begins. Third, small-cell screening is valuable for ranking reactions but does not establish practical-cell or module safety. Fourth, added safety functions must be evaluated against thickness, mass, impedance, energy density, durability, and manufacturing penalties. Fifth, battery-management systems and predictive diagnostics are most useful when multi-signal warning is connected to a defined intervention and validated for false alarms and transferability. The resulting framework integrates materials, full-cell architecture, manufacturing quality, diagnostics, battery management, and cross-chemistry evidence maturity into a scale-matched strategy for safer next-generation batteries.