Thermal and state-of-charge (SOC) imbalance is well known to cause non-uniform ageing in batteries. This paper presents the electro-thermal control of a multi-level converter (MLC) based modular battery to address this issue. The modular battery provides a large redundancy in synthesizing terminal voltage, which gives extra degrees-of-freedom in control on cell level. There are multiple tightly coupled control objectives including the simultaneous thermal and SOC balancing as well as battery terminal voltage control. The main purpose of this paper is to devise an electro-thermal control scheme for cases where full future driving information is not accessible. The control scheme is based on decomposition of controller into two orthogonal components, one for voltage control and the other for balancing control. This problem decomposition enables the application of constrained linear quadratic model predictive control scheme to solve the balancing problem elegantly. The control scheme is thoroughly evaluated through simulations of a four cell modular battery. The results show that a rather short prediction horizon is sufficient to achieve robust control performance.

In this study, the simultaneous use of a multi-level converter (MLC) as a DC-motor drive and as an active battery cell balancer is investigated. MLCs allow each battery cell in a battery pack to be independently switched on and off, thereby enabling the potential non-uniform use of battery cells. By exploiting this property and the brake regeneration phases in the drive cycle, MLCs can balance both the state of charge (SoC) and temperature differences between cells, which are two known causes of battery wear, even without reciprocating the coolant flow inside the pack. The optimal control policy (OP) that considers both battery pack temperature and SoC dynamics is studied in detail based on the assumption that information on the state of each cell, the schedule of reciprocating air flow and the future driving profile are perfectly known. Results show that OP provides significant reductions in temperature and in SoC deviations compared with the uniform use of all cells even with uni-directional coolant flow. Thus, reciprocating coolant flow is a redundant function for a MLC-based cell balancer. A specific contribution of this paper is the derivation of a state-space electro-thermal model of a battery submodule for both uni-directional and reciprocating coolant flows under the switching action of MLC, resulting in OP being derived by the solution of a convex optimization problem.

The modeling and design of an active battery cell balancing system using MultiLevel Converter (MLC) for EV/HEV/PHEV is studied. The MLC allows to independently switch ON/OFF each battery cell in a battery pack . This extra degree-of-freedom (DoF) can be exploited to optimally use each cell in order to balance among them the temperature and state-of-charge (SoC). This study has shown that the constrained convex optimization based control policy, exploiting the extra DoF of MLC, gives significant benefit in terms of reduction in temperature and SoC deviations, especially under parameter variations, compared to uniformly using all the cells. Thus, the MLC has promising potential to offer extra benefit of achieving cell balancing while being simultaneously used as a motor driver.

The battery pack lifetime is severely affected by the State-of-Charge (SOC) and thermal imbalance among its cells, which is inevitable in large automotive batteries. In this review paper, the need of simultaneous thermal and SOC balancing is emphasized. Thermal and SOC balancing are two tightly coupled objectives. However, we argue here that it is possible to achieve these simultaneously by using a balancing device that enables the non-uniform use of cells, optimally using the brake regeneration phases and load variations in the drive cycle, and exploiting cell redundancy in the battery pack. The balancer must provide extra degree-of-freedom in control by distributing a large battery pack into smaller units to enable an independent cell/module-level control of a battery system.

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