Interactive charging performance of a series connected battery with shunting equalizers

One of the most commonly used cell equalizers, the shunting equalizer, exhibits interactive performance with series connected energy storage cells. Experimental charging tests were carried out on series connected supercapacitors or lithium-ion cells to investigate this interactive performance. This paper presents and analyzes the charging performance of series connected cells with shunting equalizers to provide a qualitative understanding of the interaction between the charge and shunt currents. The experimental results indicated that the inflection points in voltage and current profiles produced by the equalizers may be useful in detecting voltage imbalances without measuring individual cell voltages.