Battery Modeling and Parameter Extraction for Drive Cycle Loss Evaluation of a Modular Battery System for Vehicles Based on a Cascaded H-Bridge Multilevel Inverter

Abstract

This article deals with the modeling and the parameterization of the battery packs used in cascaded H-bridge multilevel propulsion inverters. Since the battery packs are intermittently conducting the motor currents, the battery cells are stressed with a dynamic current containing a substantial amount of low-order harmonic components up to a couple of kHz, which is a major difference in comparison to a traditional two-level inverter drive. Different models, such as pure resistive and dynamic RC -networks, are considered to model the energy losses for different operating points (OPs) and driving cycles. Using a small-scale setup, the models’ parameters are extracted using both a low-frequency, pulsed current, and an electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) sweep. The models are compared against measurements conducted on the small-scale setup at different OPs. Additionally, a drive cycle loss comparison is simulated. The simple resistive model overestimates the losses by about 20% and is, thus, not suitable. The dynamic three-time-constant model, parameterized by a pulsed current, complies with the measurements for all analyzed OPs, especially at low speed, with a maximum deviation of 3.8%. Extracting the parameters using an EIS seems suitable for higher speeds, though the losses for the chosen OPs are underestimated by 1.5%–7.9%.