Smart Battery, a New Technology

Abstract

Lithium-ion batteries are extensively used in a wide range of applications from electric vehicles to energy storage systems. Although the performance parameters in terms of energy density and cost have already met the targets, the remaining challenges are improved safety and longer lifetime. Especially for battery packs with many cells, the degradation process is accelerated due to the difference between cells electrical characteristics leading to a limited lifetime and reliability issues. This lecture introduces the novel concept of Smart Battery that combines batteries with advanced power electronics and artificial intelligence (AI) with the purpose to develop a new generation of battery solution for transportation and grid storage with extended lifetime. The key feature is the bypass device, a half-bridge parallel to each cell, that can control individual cell-level load management without affecting the load. An advanced AI-based lifetime controller is trained to recognize the signs of stressed battery cells and decide to insert relaxation time, resulting in a pulsed current operation and extended lifetime with up to 100%. The smart battery unique architecture is capable of on-line retraining of AI lifetime controller using data streaming from cells and cloud computing. The smart battery technology is currently at proof of concept stage.