Two-Mode Active Balancing Circuit Based on Switched-Capacitor and Three-Resonant-State LC Units for Series-Connected Cell Strings

Abstract

This article proposes a two-mode active balancing circuit for series-connected cell strings. The proposed balancing circuit has two operation modes: any cell to any cell (AC2AC) and direct cell to cell (DC2C) modes. In AC2AC mode, the balancing circuit can be equivalent to an improved switched-capacitor (SC) balancing circuit, and the energy is transferred among all imbalanced cells, implementing the higher balancing speed when the voltage gap between cells and the number of imbalanced cells are large. In DC2C mode, the proposed balancing circuit can be equivalent to a balancing circuit based on three-resonant-state <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">LC</i> unit, and the energy is transferred from the highest voltage cell to the lowest voltage one, achieving the higher balancing efficiency and speed as well as accuracy when the voltage gap between cells is small. The operation state, balancing power, and balancing efficiency of each mode are analyzed in detail. The control strategy and design considerations of the balancing circuit are introduced to obtain the optimal balancing performance. Experimental results are provided to verify the validity of the proposed balancing circuit. The results show that the proposed balancing circuit achieves high balancing accuracy and efficiency as well as balancing speed.