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Li-ion battery internal short circuits are a major safety issue for electric vehicles, and can lead to serious consequences such as battery thermal runaway. An internal short can be caused by mechanical abuse, high temperature, overcharging, and lithium plating. The low impedance or hard internal short circuit is the most dangerous kind. The high internal current flow can lead to battery temperature increase, thermal runaway, and even explosion in a few seconds. Algorithms that can quickly detect such serious events with a high confidence level and which are robust to sensor noise are needed to ensure passenger safety. False positives are also undesirable as many thermal runaway mitigation techniques, such as activating pyrotechnic safety switches, would disable the vehicle. Conventional methods of battery internal short detection, including voltage and surface temperature based algorithms, work well for a single cell. However, these methods are difficult to apply in large scale battery packs with many parallel cells. In this study, we propose a new internal short detection method by using cell swelling information during the early stages of a battery heating caused by an internal short circuit. By measuring cell expansion force, higher confidence level detection can be achieved for an internal short circuit in an electric vehicle scale battery pack.
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Extending Battery System Operation via Adaptive Reconfiguration
Large-scale battery packs are commonly used in applications such as electric vehicles (EVs) and smart grids. Traditionally, to provide stable voltage to the loads, voltage regulators are used to convert battery packs’ output voltage to those of the loads’ required levels, causing power loss especially when the difference between the supplied and required voltages is large or when the load is light. In this article, we address this issue via a reconfiguration framework for the battery system. By abstracting the battery system as a cell graph, we develop an adaptive reconfiguration algorithm to identify the desired system configurations based on real-time load requirements. Our design is evaluated via both prototype-based experiments, EV driving trace-based emulations, and large-scale simulations. The results demonstrate an extended system operation time of up to 5×, especially when facing severe cell imbalance.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1739577
- PAR ID:
- 10301374
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1550-4859
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 21
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3284556
