A new data-stream-mining-based battery equalization method

Balancing battery cells is a key task for battery management systems (BMS). Imbalances of cells decrease the capacity and lifetime of the battery pack. Many balancing topologies and strategies have been proposed to balance the electric charges among cells and most of the intelligent control strategies select cells (to shuttle charges) by comparing their terminal voltages. However, the nature of battery equalization is to balance the energy stored in individual cells. The measured terminal voltage is just an external characteristic and cannot accurately reflect the state of charge (SOC) of the cell, especially in a noisy environment. Additionally, when the consistencies of cells are very poor, balancing the cells with terminal voltages will lead to serious errors. In this paper, we introduced a novel battery balancing method, in which the charge-balancing criterion was not the cell voltage, but the shuttling capacities among cells. Data stream mining (DSM) technique was used to calculate the shuttling capacities. A single switched capacitor (SSC) based cell balancing topology was used to test the performance of the proposed method. With the obtained summary information, the cells, the sequence, and the quantity of the equalized charge can be decided automatically by the proposed algorithm. The simulation and experiment results have shown that the proposed method was effective and convenient.