Abstract
Technology improvements and cost reduction allow electrochemical energy storage systems based on Lithium-ion cells to massively be used in medium-power applications, where the low system cost is the major constraint. Battery pack maintenance services are expected to be required more often in the future. For this reason, a low-cost instrumentation able to characterize the cells of a battery pack is needed. Several works use low-cost programmable units as Li-ion cell tester, but they are generally based on proprietary-software running on a personal computer. This work introduces an open-source software architecture based on Python language to control common low-cost commercial laboratory instruments. The Python software application is executed on a Raspberry Pi board, which represents the control block of the hardware architecture, instead of a personal computer. The good results obtained during the validation process demonstrate that the proposed cell station tester features measurement accuracy and precision suitable for the characterization of Li-ion cells. Finally, as a simple example of application, the state of health of twenty 40 Ah LiFePO4 cells belonging to a battery pack used in an E-scooter was successfully determined.
Highlights
Lithium-Ion Batteries (LIBs) are increasingly penetrating the high-power mobility applications, such as the Electric Vehicles (EV) and Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV), because of the higher power and energy densities compared to other electrochemical Energy Storage System (ESS)
LIB cost still limits its utilization in medium-power electric mobility field, such as in E-scooters, where the cost of the ESS still remains a large part of the total cost of the system and it is, one of the major issues for the full exploitation of the LIB technology in this field
Even if the cell capacity in medium-power LIB varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and from application to application, a reasonable choice is to tailor the instrument to battery packs with cells the nominal capacity of which ranges from 10 Ah [20] to 60 Ah [21]
Summary
Lithium-Ion Batteries (LIBs) are increasingly penetrating the high-power mobility applications, such as the Electric Vehicles (EV) and Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV), because of the higher power and energy densities compared to other electrochemical Energy Storage System (ESS). The weak aspect of this approach is that battery assembly is more complex, as it must allow the individual cell replacement In this refitting scenario, test equipment capable of characterizing the cells of an LIB, in particular, to measure their SoH, is needed. 200 W [2] up to some kilowatts [8], and considering that the measurement of the capacity of a cell usually consists of a current integration operation [9,10] that does not require complex high frequency analysis, the two last instrument categories would be the preferred choice for extracting the SoH of an LIB in this kind of application.
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