Resting weak cells to improve battery pack's capacity delivery via reconfiguration

Liang He, Eugene Kim, Kang G. Shin
2016 Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Future Energy Systems - e-Energy '16  
Cell imbalance commonly found in large battery packs degrades their capacity delivery, especially for cells connected in series where the weakest cell dominates their overall capacity. In this paper, we present a case study of exploiting system reconfiguration to mitigate the cell imbalance in battery packs. Specifically, instead of using all the cells in a battery pack to support the load, selectively skipping cells to be discharged may actually enhance the pack's capacity delivery. Based on
more » ... is observation, we propose CSR, a Cell Skipping-assisted Reconfiguration algorithm that identifies the system configuration with (near)-optimal capacity delivery. We evaluate CSR using large-scale emulation based on empirically collected discharge traces of 40 Lithium-ion cells. CSR is shown to achieve close-to-optimal capacity delivery when the cell imbalance in the battery pack is low and improve the capacity delivery by up to 94% in case of high imbalance.
doi:10.1145/2934328.2934336 dblp:conf/eenergy/HeKS16 fatcat:gyegvosabnd4vgcfp43q4yknce