Using the Cell Broadband Engine to Compute an Electrochemical Battery Model

This paper discusses the usage of a two-dimensional electrochemical battery model of a lead acid battery cell as a state-of-health indicator in an embedded application. The model equations are a set of coupled highly non-linear partial differential equations that evolve with time. At each time step, these equations are solved using Newton’s Method, and a direct skyline LU solver without partial pivoting is used to solve for the battery cell’s state at each Newton step. The entire model was implemented on a Sony Playstation 3 and the direct solver at each Newton iteration step exploits the parallelism in the Cell Broadband Engine to improve performance. The parallelized direct solver outperforms state-of-the-art dense and sparse solvers running on an AMD Opteron 246-based workstation.