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.

Lithium-based batteries are considered as the most advanced batteries technology, which can be designed for high energy or high power storage systems. However, the battery cells are never fully identical due to the fabrication process, surrounding environment factors and differences between the cells tend to grow if no measures are taken. In order to have a high performance battery system, the battery cells should be continuously balanced for maintain the variation between the cells as small as possible. Without an appropriate balancing system, the individual cell voltages will differ over time and battery system capacity will decrease quickly. These issues will limit the electric range of the electric vehicle (EV) and some cells will undergo higher stress, whereby the cycle life of these cells will be shorter. Quite a lot of cell balancing/equalization topologies have been previously proposed. These balancing topologies can be categorized into passive and active balancing. Active topologies are categorized according to the active element used for storing the energy such as capacitor and/or inductive component as well as controlling switches or converters. This paper proposes an intelligent battery management system (BMS) including a battery pack charging and discharging control with a battery pack thermal management system. The BMS user input/output interfacing. The battery balancing system is based on battery pack modularization architecture. The proposed modularized balancing system has different equalization systems that operate inside and outside the modules. Innovative single switched capacitor (SSC) control strategy is proposed to balance between OPEN ACCESSEnergies 2014, 7 2898 the battery cells in the module (inside module balancing, IMB). Novel utilization of isolated bidirectional DC/DC converter (IBC) is proposed to balance between the modules with the aid of the EV auxiliary battery (AB). Finally an experimental step-up has been implemented for the validation of the proposed balancing system.