LAUSR

To manage thousands of battery cells effectively, a reconfigurable battery system has emerged where each battery cell is equipped with a set of switches for controlling connectivity (i.e. series, parallel, bypass or combinations thereof). While most studies have focused on maximising operation-time or life-time of a reconfigurable battery system, few studies have addressed how to quickly balance voltage of cells, which affects both efficiency and safety of a battery system. A new discharge scheduling policy for battery cell voltage balancing for a reconfigurable battery system is proposed. Based on the analysis why existing naive approaches are not effective for voltage balancing, a new approach consisting of three steps is designed: determination of a set of battery cells to be discharged, calculation of a target voltage, and distribution of the system load to each battery. The present simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms three alternative ones up to 45.6% in terms of voltage balancing.