Cell inconsistency can lead to poor performance and safety hazards. Therefore, cell equalizer is essentially required to prevent the series-connected cells from overcharging, undercharging, and overdischarging. Among current equalization schemes, passive equalizer has a continuously wasting energy with low equalization efficiency, and active equalizer has high cost with complex circuit structure. In this study, a novel composite equalizer based on an additional cell with low complexity is presented. This method combines a passive equalizer and an active equalizer. Firstly, the configuration and circuit of our proposed composite equalizer are introduced, and the equalization principle is analyzed. On this basis, the control strategy and algorithm of the composite equalizer are further proposed. Finally, the composite equalizer is verified through simulation and experiment in various cases. The study results show that this method improves both the consistency level and the available capacity of the battery pack. Moreover, our proposed equalizer can overcome the shortcomings of commonly used equalizer and combining the advantages of different equalizer to maximize the equalization efficiency with a simpler equalizer structure.

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