Capacity and state‐of‐charge (SOC) estimation for lithium‐ion cells based on charging time differences curves

Abstract

Summary The battery pack of electric vehicles (EV) is generally composed of multiple cells in series. Due to the inconsistency between the cells in the production process and use stage, the capacity and state‐of‐charge (SOC) of the cells will be different. We propose an online estimation method based on the charging curve similarity principle in this paper. The proposed method uses a series of charging time differences (CTD) during the charge. By analyzing the CTD curve, the capacity and SOC difference can be achieved. The first‐order resistance circuit model is used for the series charging curve simulation. Further experimental verification is conducted using two groups of four cells in series. In simulations and experiments, the error of the proposed capacity estimation method and the initial SOC error are less than 1%. Finally, the robustness of the proposed method is verified using EV cloud data. The results demonstrate that the proposed method has good robustness at the level of EV cloud data.