Reconfigurable Battery Techniques and Systems: A Survey

Battery packs with a large number of battery cells are becoming more and more widely adopted in electronic systems, such as robotics, renewable energy systems, energy storage in smart grids, and electronic vehicles. Therefore, a well-designed battery pack is essential for battery applications. In the literature, the majority of research in battery pack design focuses on battery management system, safety circuit, and cell-balancing strategies. Recently, the reconfigurable battery pack design has gained increasing attentions as a promising solution to solve the problems existing in the conventional battery packs and associated battery management systems, such as low energy efficiency, short pack lifespan, safety issues, and low reliability. One of the most prominent features of reconfigurable battery packs is that the battery cell topology can be dynamically reconfigured in the real-time fashion based on the current condition (in terms of the state of charge and the state of health) of battery cells. So far, there are several reconfigurable battery schemes having been proposed and validated in the literature, all sharing the advantage of cell topology reconfiguration that ensures balanced cell states during charging and discharging, meanwhile providing strong fault tolerance ability. This survey is undertaken with the intent of identifying the state-of-the-art technologies of reconfigurable battery as well as providing review on related technologies and insight on future research in this emerging area

Modular, Scalable Battery Systems with Integrated Cell Balancing and DC Bus Power Processing

Traditional electric vehicle and stationary battery systems use series-connected battery packs that employ centralized battery management and power processing architecture. Though, these systems meet the basic safety and power requirements with a simple hard- ware structure, the approach results in a battery pack that is energy and power limited by weak cells throughout life and most importantly at end-of-life. The applications of battery systems can benefit significantly from modular, scalable battery systems capable of advanced cell balancing, efficient power processing, and cost gains via reuse beyond first-use application. The design of modular battery systems has unique requirements for the power electronics designer, including architecture, design, modeling and control of power processing converters, and battery balancing methods. This dissertation considers the requirements imposed by electric vehicle and stationary applications and presents design and control of modular battery systems to overcome challenges associated with conventional systems. The modular battery system uses cell or substring-level power converters to combine battery balancing and power processing functionality and opens the door to new opportunities for advanced cell balancing methods. This approach enables balancing control to act on cell-level information, reroute power around weaker cells in a string of cells to optimally deploy the stored energy, and achieve performance gains throughout the life of the battery pack. With this approach, the integrated balancing power converters can achieve system cost and efficiency gains by replacing or eliminating some of the conventional components inside battery systems such as passive balancing circuits and high-voltage, high-power converters. In addition, when coupled with life prognostic based cell balancing control, the modular system can extend the lifetime of a battery pack by up to 40%. The modular architecture design and control concepts developed in this dissertation can be applied to designs of large battery packs and improve battery pack performance, lifetime, size, and cost

Energy efficiency improvement of Li-ion battery packs via balancing techniques

Due to worldwide energy consumption increase, different energy strategies are growing in order to reduce fossil fuel consumption, increase renewable energy impact and increase energy efficiency. Renewable energy impact in the electric grid is increased by combination with energy storage systems. Energy storage systems storage energy during low consumption periods and insert energy during high power demand time. The efficiency and the stability of the electric grid are improved. The thesis work is focused on the energy improvement of Li-ion based energy storage systems. To improve the energy of series connected Li-ion energy storage system balancing systems are required. The thesis deals with the analysis of unbalancing processes in series connected Li-ion cells and the balancing system design to improve the Li-ion battery pack energetic behavior. The search of a low complexity active balancing system to compete against the passive balancing system is one of the most important research lines.Mundu mailako energia kontsumoa igotzen ari denez, araudi energetiko berriak sortzen ari dira erregai fosilen kontsumoa murritzeko, energia berriztagarriak ezartzeko eta efizientzia energetikoa handitzeko. Energia berriztagarrien ezartzea eta beraien erabilpena sare elektrikoan, asko hobetzen da metatze sistemen laguntzarekin. Metatze sistemek energia batzen dute kontsumo txikiko uneetan energia txertatuz sare elektrikora kontsumo handiko aldiuneetan, sare elektrikoaren efizientzia eta egonkortasuna hobetuz. Tesi lana litio ioizko metatze sistemen energia efizientzia hobetzean datza. Litio ioizko metatze sistemak litio zelden serie konekzioak dira. Seriean konektatuko sistema hauen efizientzia hobetzeko beharrezkoa da sistema orekatzaileak erabiltzea zelden artean sortutako desberdintasunak konpentsatzeko. Tesi hau zelden arteko desoreken analisian eta desoreka hauek konpentsatzeko beharrezkoak diren oreka sistemen diseinuan zentratzen da. Oreka sistema aktibo konpetitiboen diseinua, oreka sistema pasiboekin lehiatzeko da tesiaren lan inguru nagusienetakoa

Electro-thermal Control of Modular Battery using Model Predictive Control with Control Projections

This paper proposes a novel model predictive control algorithm to achieve voltage regulation and simultaneous thermal and SOC balancing of a modular battery using limited future load information. The modular battery is based on multilevel converter (MLC), which provides a large redundancy in voltage synthesis and extra degree-of-freedom in control. The proposed algorithm is based on orthogonal decomposition of controller into two components, one for voltage control and the other for balancing control. The voltage control decisions are made using a simple minimum norm problem whereas the balancing control decisions are made in two stages. The first stage computes a balancing control policy based on an unconstrained LQ problem and the second stage enforces constraint on control actions via projection on a time-varying control constraint polytope. The control algorithm shows promising performance in a simulation study of a four cell modular battery. The performance and the simplicity of the control algorithm make it attractive for real-time implementation in large battery packs

Modular Battery Systems for Electric Vehicles based on Multilevel Inverter Topologies - Opportunities and Challenges

Modular battery systems based on multilevel inverter (MLI) topologies can possibly overcome some shortcomings of two-level inverters when used for vehicle propulsion. The results presented in this thesis aim to point out the advantages and disadvantages, as well as the technical challenges, of modular vehicle battery systems based on MLIs in comparison to a conventional, two-level IGBT inverter drivetrain. The considered key aspects for this comparative investigation are the drive cycle efficiency, the inverter cost, the fault tolerance capability of the drivetrain and the conducted electromagnetic emissions. Extensive experiments have been performed to support the results and conclusions.In this work, it is shown that the simulated drive cycle efficiency of different low-voltage-MOSFET-based, cascaded seven-level inverter types is improved in comparison to a similarly rated, two-level IGBT inverter drivetrain. For example, the simulated WLTP drive cycle efficiency of a cascaded double-H-bridge (CDHB) inverter drivetrain in comparison to a two-level IGBT inverter, when used in a small passenger car, is increased from 94.24% to 95.04%, considering the inverter and the ohmic battery losses. In contrast, the obtained efficiency of a similar rated seven-level cascaded H-bridge (CHB) drivetrain is almost equal to that of the two-level inverter drivetrain, but with the help of a hybrid modulation technique, utilizing fundamental selective harmonic elimination at lower speeds, it could be improved to 94.85%. In addition, the CDHB and CHB inverters’ cost, in comparison to the two-level inverter, is reduced from 342€ to 202€ and 121€, respectively. Furthermore, based on a simple three-level inverter with a dual battery pack, it is shown that MLIs inherently allow for a fault tolerant operation. It is explained how the drivetrain of a neutral point clamped (NPC) inverter can be operated under a fault condition, so that the vehicle can drive with a limited maximum power to the next service station, referred to as limp home mode. Especially, the detection and localization of open circuit faults has been investigated and verified through simulations and experiments.Moreover, it is explained how to measure the conducted emissions of an NPC inverter with a dual battery pack according to the governing standard, CISPR 25, because the additional neutral point connection forms a peculiar three-wire DC source. To separate the measured noise spectra into CM, line-DM and phase-DMquantities, two hardware separators based on HF transformers are developed and utilized. It is shown that the CM noise is dominant. Furthermore, the CM noise is reduced by 3dB to 6dB when operating the inverter with three-level instead of two-level modulation

Control of Series Connected Battery Powered Modules

Batteries are a very common type of power source used for all sorts of applications. However, these batteries do not last forever. The purpose of this thesis is to explain and implement a strategy which allows batteries to have a second life; to be able to be re-charged and re-used for another set period of time once they no longer meet a system’s requirements. The preferable way to do this is to make each cell have the same state of charge (SOC) which will lead to a longer lasting battery pack. These batteries will be hooked up to a battery powered module (BPM) for charging, and these BPMs will need to be controlled by a battery management system (BMS). This BMS, also known as string controller board, sends commands to the several BPMs connected. This thesis goes over the strategy implemented to achieve this objective, with the result focusing on the regulation of output voltage and cell SOC

A comparison of power conversion systems for modular battery-based energy storage systems

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.A modular battery-based energy storage system is composed by several battery packs distributed among different modules or parts of a power conversion system (PCS). The design of such PCS can be diverse attending to different criteria such as reliability, efficiency, fault tolerance, compactness and flexibility. The present paper proposes a quantitative and qualitative comparison among the most widely proposed PCSs for modular battery-based energy storage systems in literature. The obtained results confirm the high performance of those PCSs based on the parallel connection of different modules to a single point of common coupling, also identifying those based on modular multilevel cascaded converters as promising concepts according to the assumptions of the present paper.Postprint (author's final draft

UPEL Students Publish Research Papers on Electric Vehicle Battery Management System at COMPEL 2015 | Utah State University Power Electronics Lab

UPEL students, M. Muneeb Ur Rehman and Hongjie Wang, published three research papers at COMPEL 2015, the annual IEEE conference for Control and Modeling for Power Electronics. The research work is part of the AMPED project for which UPEL is working with a multi-disciplinary team including the University of Colorado at Boulder and Colorado Springs, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Ford Motor Company. The project is funded in part by the United States Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects (ARPA-E).https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/engineering_news/1169/thumbnail.jp