Battery Equalization Control Based on the Shunt Transistor Method

Abstract

Electric Vehicle (EV) researches are currently becoming of special importance and the EV battery system is particularly relevant in the EV design. In these applications, series connected batteries are necessary since a single battery cannot achieve the voltage requirements. Internal and external sources lead the batteries string to become unbalanced, which is an important factor to be taken into account, as premature cells degradation, safety hazards, and reduced capacity will occur for unbalanced systems. The different balancing methods are presented and compared in this paper, and finally the switch capacitor and the double-tiered switching capacitor are considered the best option. However, their speed depends on the voltage difference between the batteries in the string, and when their voltage difference is low, the equalization speed decreases significantly, leading the battery pack to be unbalanced for longer. A novel equalization method is presented, that improves the aforementioned methods performance by applying a new control to a shunt transistor method. Low cost, size, and complexity, together with higher speed and efficiency are obtained. A prototype has been built, and experimental results are presented.