This paper presents a distributed thermal model for a lithium-ion electrode plate pair used to predict the distributed electrical and thermal behavior of the electrode pair including tabs. Our model was developed by coupling the heat equation with a pseudo two dimensional (P2D) physics-based electrochemical model. The local heat generation rate is predicted by the P2D model at every node point in the 2D electrode pair. To reduce significantly the computation load of the model, a linear approximation method is introduced to decouple the electrochemical model from the heat equation with a very slight loss in accuracy. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.