Single Switched Capacitor Battery Balancing System Enhancements

Battery management systems (BMS) are a key element in electric vehicle energy storage systems. The BMS performs several functions concerning to the battery system, its key task being balancing the battery cells. Battery cell unbalancing hampers electric vehicles’ performance, with differing individual cell voltages decreasing the battery pack capacity and cell lifetime, leading to the eventual failure of the total battery system. Quite a lot of cell balancing topologies have been proposed, such as shunt resistor, shuttling capacitor, inductor/transformer based and DC energy converters. The shuttling capacitor balancing systems in particular have not been subject to much research efforts however, due to their perceived low balancing speed and high cost. This paper tries to fill this gap by briefly discussing the shuttling capacitor cell balancing topologies, focusing on the single switched capacitor (SSC) cell balancing and proposing a novel procedure to improve the SSC balancing system performance. This leads to a new control strategy for the SSC system that can decrease the balancing system size, cost, balancing time and that can improve the SSC balancing system efficiency.