Distributed control of active cell balancing and low-voltage bus regulation in electric vehicles using hierarchical model-predictive control

Zhe Gong (Corresponding author), B.A.C. van de Ven, Kshitij M. Gupta, Carlos da Silva, Cristina H. Amon, Henk Jan Bergveld, Tijs Donkers, Olivier Trescases

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

14 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

Electric vehicle battery performance near end-of-life is limited by mismatched cell degradation, leading to an estimated 5-10% cell capacity variation across the pack. Active cell balancing hardware architectures incorporating a Low-Voltage (LV) bus supply have been introduced to unlock lost capacity due to cell imbalance at reduced cost, through elimination of the vehicle's 400-to-12V dc-dc converter. In this work, a hierarchical model-predictive control scheme is applied to a time-shared isolated converter active balancing architecture that incorporates LV bus supply. The proposed controller efficiently divides computation among the battery management system hardware components. The energy-buffering capability of the lead-acid battery, which is connected to the LV bus, is used to trade-off balancing and bus regulation objectives, reducing peak power and improving the system cost-effectiveness. Simultaneous state-of-charge balancing and LV bus regulation is verified in simulation and experiment using real-world drive and LV load data collected from a GM Bolt electric vehicle. Similar controller performance compared to a central scheme is achieved in simulation. The experimental setup includes a custom 12S2P, 3.9kWh, liquid-cooled Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt battery module with embedded battery management system. The controller performance is evaluated with an initial maximum state-of-charge imbalance of 6.8%.
Original languageEnglish
Article number8928973
Pages (from-to)10464-10473
Number of pages10
JournalIEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics
Volume67
Issue number12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2020

Keywords

  • Automotive electronics
  • Batteries
  • Computer architecture
  • Electric vehicles
  • Lead
  • Microprocessors
  • State of charge
  • Temperature measurement
  • battery management systems (BMS)
  • control design
  • electric vehicles (EVs)
  • energy storage
  • lithium batteries

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