A novel combined online method for SOC estimation of a Li-Ion battery with practical and industrial considerations

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Estimation of the state of charge (SOC) in the battery management systems (BMS) is very crucial. However, the BMS consistently suffers from inaccuracy of SOC estimation and high computational burden in industrial applications. Herein, we propose a novel combined SOC estimation approach with high accuracy, simplicity in implementation and, robustness that can be implemented on the low-cost microcontrollers. The basis of the method is to online identification the open circuit voltage (OCV) value of the battery simultaneously with other unknown parameters of the battery equivalent circuit model (ECM). Using this identified OCV, SOC is extracted from the OCV-SOC curve, directly. This direct method is an open-loop estimation method and tends to get lower SOC accuracy compared with known methods. To overcome this disadvantage, a combined method is proposed. Hence, to estimate SOC in this method, in the middle part of the OCV-SOC curve (linear part) and after identifying OCV from recursive least square algorithm (RLS) method with a forgetting factor, SOC is estimated directly via OCV-SOC curve. Furthermore, in the other parts of the curve especially non-linear parts, SOC is estimated with the EKF algorithm. In summary, not only estimation accuracy will increase, but also the computational burden of the EKF will decrease. In this paper, voltage and current samples of the battery at each sample time are the inputs of the algorithms and gained from the known “LA-92 dynamic driving cycle” test. To validate the efficiency of the presented method, results are compared with the EKF algorithm and direct method. The experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the EKF calculations by almost 15 % and guarantee high accuracy SOC estimation. The maximum error of the proposed method is <2.5 %.