ADVANCED CHARACTERIZATION OF BATTERY CELL DYNAMICS

Abstract

Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) are gaining market share but still must overcome several engineering challenges related to the lithium-ion battery packs powering them. The batteries must be carefully managed to optimize safety and performance. The estimation of battery states, which cannot be measured directly, is an important part of battery management and remains an active area of research since small gains in estimation accuracy can help reduce cost and increase BEV range. This thesis presents several improvements to battery state estimation using different methods. Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) is receiving increased attention from researchers as a method for state estimation and diagnostics for real-time applications. Due to battery relaxation behaviour, long rest times are commonly used before performing the EIS measurement. In this work, methods were developed to significantly shorten the required rest times, and a State of Health (SoH) estimation strategy was proposed by taking advantage of the relaxation effect as measured by EIS. This method was demonstrated to have an estimation error of below 1%. At low temperatures, the accuracy of the battery model becomes poor due to the non-linear battery response to current. By using an adaptive filter called the Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) filter, the next part of this work showed how to significantly improve low temperature State of Charge (SoC) estimation. Further reduction in estimation errors was achieved by pairing the IMM with the Smooth Variable Structure Filter (SVSF), for SoC estimation errors below 2%. The work presented in this thesis also includes the application of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) for SoC estimation from EIS data. Finally, an extensive aging study was conducted and an accelerated protocol was compared to a realistic drive cycle based protocol using EIS as a characterization tool.