Design and Analysis of an Active High Voltage Electric Accumulator

Abstract

Recently in more or all electric vehicles, higher voltage batteries are used which employ large number of cells in series. Series connection among cells may lead to single point of failures, safety and charge equalization issues that demand complex control and costly and/or lossy battery management methods. Most present day high voltage batteries use dissipative-charge balancing methods, which result in poor efficiency, additional thermal management burden and lower overall vehicle range. Furthermore, the output voltages of such batteries remain unregulated and may widely change with load and environmental conditions, complicating the overall power pass design of the electrical power system. As a step forward to address these issues, this thesis studies a fault-tolerant regulated active high voltage electric accumulator with integrated power electronics for safe charge and discharge of the high voltage energy storage system.