On Dynamic Reconfiguration of a Large-Scale Battery System

Electric vehicles powered with large-scale battery packs are gaining popularity as gasoline price soars. Large-scale battery packs usually consist of an estimated 12,000 battery cells connected in series and parallel, which are susceptible to battery-cell failures. Unfortunately, current battery-management systems are unable to handle the inevitable battery-cell failures very well. To address this problem, we propose a dynamic reconfiguration framework that monitors, reconfigures, and controls large-scale battery packs online. The framework is built upon a syntactic bypassing mechanism that provides a set of rules for changing the battery-pack configuration, and a semantic bypassing mechanism by which the battery-cell connectivity is reconfigured to recover from a battery-cell failure. In particular, the semantic bypassing mechanism is dictated by constant-voltage-keeping and dynamic-voltage-allowing policies. The former policy is effective in preventing unavoidable voltage drops during the battery discharge, while the latter policy is effective in supplying different amounts of power to meet a wide-range of application requirements. Our experimental evaluation has shown the proposed framework to enable the battery packs to be 9 times as fault-tolerant as a legacy scheme.