Near-Fastest Battery Balancing by Cell/Module Reconfiguration
Journal article, 2019

Charge imbalance is a very common issue in multi-cell/module/pack battery systems due to manufacturing variations, inconsistent charging/discharging, and uneven thermal distribution. As a consequence, the deliverable charge capacity, battery lifespan, and system reliability may all decrease over time. To tackle this issue, various external circuit designs can be attached for charge balance, and the internal battery cell/module/pack connection can also significantly affect the charge balance performance. This paper focuses on minimizing the battery charge equalization (BCE) time by battery cell/module reconfiguration. Specifically, for the reconfigurable module-based BCE system, we propose reconfiguration algorithms for fast charge equalization under different levels of system reconfigurability. For battery systems allowing module reconfiguration and intra-module cell reconfiguration, the proposed module-based bounded reconfiguration algorithm can reach or get very close to the minimum BCE times obtained by exhaustive search. When the reconfigurability level is extended by allowing inter-module cell reconfiguration, the proposed module-based complete reconfiguration algorithm can achieve similar optimality to that of the genetic algorithm (GA). Moreover, as compared to the circuit experiments, exhaustive search, and GA, the proposed algorithms take much less computational time. The optimality and computational efficiency of the proposed algorithms are demonstrated by both circuit and numerical experiments.

optimality

Battery system

computational efficiency

battery cell/module reconfiguration

battery charge balance/equalization

Author

Weiji Han

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Systems and control

Changfu Zou

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Systems and control

Liang Zhang

University of Connecticut

Quan Ouyang

Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Torsten Wik

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Systems and control

IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid

1949-3053 (ISSN) 19493061 (eISSN)

Vol. 10 6 6954-6964 8706602

Subject Categories

Computer Engineering

Telecommunications

Embedded Systems

DOI

10.1109/TSG.2019.2915013

More information

Latest update

4/5/2022 6