Study of the Characteristics of Battery Packs in Electric Vehicles with Parallel-Connected Lithium-Ion Battery Cells

This paper studies the characteristics of battery packs with parallel-connected lithium-ion battery (LiB) cells. To investigate the influence of the cell inconsistency problem in parallel-connected cells, a group of different degraded LiB cells were selected to build various battery packs and test them using a battery test bench. The physical model was developed to simulate the operation of the parallel-connected packs. The experimental results and simulation indicate that, with different degraded cells in parallel, there could be capacity loss and large difference in discharge current, which may cause further accelerated degradation and a more serious inconsistency problem.