A Lithium-Ion Battery Balancing Circuit Based on Synchronous Rectification

Abstract

In this paper, a battery balancing circuit is proposed for the series-connected lithium-ion battery cells based on the principle of synchronous rectification. The proposed balancing circuit, also referred to as an equalizer, mainly includes a buck–boost converter (BBC), a multiport half-bridge converter (MHBC), and a driving circuit. The MHBC is coupled with a multiwinding transformer. Compared with the conventional congeneric methods, the number of transformer windings is almost reduced by half, leading to a more compact size and lower cost. Moreover, the secondary <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">mosfet</small> s of the MHBC are synchronously driven by the primary half-bridge converter (HBC) without the need of additional isolated <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">mosfet</small> gate drivers and power supplies, dramatically reducing the circuit cost and complexity. In addition, the proposed equalizer can realize the module-to-multi-cell (M2MC) equalization under severe imbalance conditions to improve the balancing speed, and work at the any-cell-to-any-cell (AC2AC) self-balancing mode under slight imbalance conditions to improve the balancing efficiency and effectiveness, which achieves a good trade-off between balancing speed and effectiveness. The expressions of the equalization current and efficiency are derived and verified by experimental results. The proposed equalizer is experimentally evaluated for a string with 12 series-connected lithium-ion cells.