Since battery packs are made up of multiple cells connected in series and parallel configurations, discrepancies in cell voltage can occur due to manufacturing variations, aging, and usage patterns.
What happens if a battery pack is out of balance?
A battery pack is out of balance when any property or state of those cells differs. Imbalanced cells lock away otherwise usable energy and increase battery degradation. Batteries that are out of balance cannot be fully charged or fully discharged, and the imbalance causes cells to wear and degrade at accelerated rates.
What does unbalanced battery pack mean?
This unbalanced pack means that every cycle delivers 10% less than the nameplate capacity, locking away the capacity you paid for and increasing degradation on every cell. The solution is battery balancing, or moving energy between cells to level them at the same SoC.
Why do batteries get overcharged and undercharged?
Individual cells within a battery pack can become unbalanced over time, meaning some cells become overcharged while others become undercharged. This occurs because there are always slight differences between cells in terms of their self-discharge rates, internal resistances, capacities, and operating temperatures.
What causes a difference in battery voltages?
A difference in cell voltages is a most typical manifestation of unbalance, which is attempted to be corrected either instantaneously or gradually through by-passing cells with higher voltage. However, the underlying reasons for voltage differences on the level of battery chemistry and discharge kinetics are not widely understood.
To prevent over discharge of cells and resulting damage, battery managements system will terminate discharge if any of the cells reached low voltage threshold. Cell based termination voltage is usually set to lower value than pack based threshold divided by number of serial cells, so that the difference can allow for a small unbalance.
How to balance a battery pack correctly?
needs two key things to balance a battery pack correctly: balancing circuitry and balancing algorithms. While a few methods exist to implement balancing circuitry, they all rely on balancing algorithms to know which cells to balance and when. So far, we have been assuming that the BMS knows the SoC and the amount of energy in each series cell.