Battery diagnosis is vital to battery-based applications because it ensures system reliability by avoiding battery failure. This paper presents a novel intelligent battery charger with an online diagnosis function to circumvent interruptions in system operation. The charger operates in normal charging and diagnosing modes. The diagnosis function is performed with the impedance spectroscopy technique, which is achieved by injecting a sinusoidal voltage excitation signal to the battery terminals without the need for additional hardware. The impedance spectrum of the battery is calculated based on voltage excitation and current response with the aid of an embedded digital lock in amplifier in a digital signal processor. The measured impedance data are utilized in the application of the complex nonlinear least squares method to extract the battery parameters of the equivalent circuit. These parameters are then compared with the reference values to reach a diagnosis. A prototype of the proposed charger is applied to four valve-regulated lead-acid batteries to measure AC impedance. The results are discussed.

The three-phase four-leg voltage-source inverter topology is an interesting option for the three-phase four-wire system. With an additional leg, this topology can achieve superior performance under unbalanced and nonlinear load conditions. However, because of the low bandwidth of conventional controllers in high-power inverter applications, the system cannot guarantee a balanced output voltage under the unbalanced load condition. Most of the methods proposed to solve this problem mainly use the multiple synchronous frame method, which requires several controllers and a large amount of computation because of frame transformation. This study proposes a simple hybrid controller that combines proportional-integral (PI) and resonant controllers in the synchronous frame synchronized with the positive-sequence component of the output voltage of the three-phase four-leg inverter. The design procedure for the controller and the theoretical analysis are presented. The performance of the proposed method is verified by the experimental results and compared with that of the conventional PI controller.

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A fuel cell power conditioning system for online diagnosis and load leveling under the condition of varying load is developed in this study. The proposed system comprises a unidirectional boost converter and a bidirectional buck-boost converter with a battery. The system operates in two different modes. In normal mode, the bidirectional converter is utilized for load leveling; in diagnostic mode, it is utilized to control load voltage while the boost converter generates perturbation current to implement the online diagnosis function through in-situ electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The proposed method can perform EIS for a fuel cell under varying-load conditions with no influence on the load. The validity and feasibility of the proposed system are verified by experiments, and the design procedure of the proposed system is detailed.

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