Abstract-Electric vehicles powered with large-scale battery packs are gaining popularity as gasoline price soars. Large-scale battery packs usually consist of an estimated 12,000 battery cells connected in series and parallel, which are susceptible to batterycell failures. Unfortunately, current battery-management systems are unable to handle the inevitable battery-cell failures very well. To address this problem, we propose a dynamic reconfiguration framework that monitors, reconfigures, and controls large-scale battery packs online. The framework is built upon a syntactic bypassing mechanism that provides a set of rules for changing the battery-pack configuration, and a semantic bypassing mechanism by which the battery-cell connectivity is reconfigured to recover from a battery-cell failure. In particular, the semantic bypassing mechanism is dictated by constant-voltage-keeping and dynamicvoltage-allowing policies. The former policy is effective in preventing unavoidable voltage drops during the battery discharge, while the latter policy is effective in supplying different amounts of power to meet a wide-range of application requirements. Our experimental evaluation has shown the proposed framework to enable the battery packs to be 9 times as fault-tolerant as a legacy scheme.
Abstract-Electric vehicles operate inefficiently with a naive battery management system that charges or discharges battery cells in a pack based solely on application load demands. The battery pack's operation-time and lifetime can be extended significantly by effectively scheduling (the cyber part) battery charge, discharge, and rest activities, based on the battery characteristics (the physical part). We propose a set of policies for scheduling battery-cell activities, called the weighted-k roundrobin (kRR) scheduling framework. This framework dynamically adapts battery-cell activities to load demands and the condition of individual cells, thereby extending the battery pack's operationtime and making them robust to anomalous voltage-imbalances. The framework comprises two key components. First, an adaptive filter estimates the upcoming load demand. Then, based on the estimated load demand, the kRR scheduler determines the number of parallel-connected cells to be discharged simultaneously. The scheduler also effectively partitions the cells in the pack, allowing the cells to be simultaneously charged and discharged in coordination with the battery reconfiguration system we developed earlier [17]. Besides the kRR scheduling framework, we characterize the discharge and recovery efficiency of a Lithiumion battery cell. The kRR scheduling framework is shown to outperform three alternative scheduling mechanisms with respect to the operation-time by 7-56%, and improve the tolerance of voltage-imbalance by up to 50%.
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