On-Board State Estimation in Electrical Vehicles: Achieving Accuracy and Computational Efficiency Through an Electrochemical Model

Success of electric mobility and connected future depends on advanced high capacity Lithium-ion batteries and a tailored battery management system that keeps track of battery health and safety to optimize the performance. The drive for advanced batteries is being pursued on one front via the development of novel chemistry, for example, blended composite cathodes to achieve enhanced performance and life. On the other front, the need for optimal battery performance via operational control viz. a robust Battery Management System (BMS) that accurately predicts state-of-charge (SOC), state-of-power (SOP) and state-of-health (SOH) in a computationally efficient way, has been lacking in many ways due to the reliance on simple and fast-to-compute models such as equivalent circuit models (ECM) that lack the accuracy needed for large battery packs. This paper reports an on-board reduced-order electrochemical thermal model (ROTM) based SOC and voltage estimation for a 12S1P configuration composite-cathode battery pack and demonstrates its practicality by implementing it on four different micro-controller units (MCU) (ATmega:2560&328, Infineon:TC275&TC297). We show that on-board ROTM based SOC and voltage prediction have better accuracy compared to the conventional ECM based methods under both static and dynamic load conditions.