Structural Comparison of Battery Balancing Architectures with Optimal Control

In this paper a systematic comparison of active balancing circuit architectures on battery module level is presented, which counteracts the multiple influences of battery cells and circuit properties on active balancing results. In a first step, battery cells and balancing circuits are abstracted to a graph representation, which enables an independent study of architectures without specific electric components of active balancing. In a second step, optimal control is introduced and applied to systematically compare different balancing architectures in more than 20000 simulations for two current design limitations. The results show which structure of active balancing is the optimal choice for a certain number of cells in a battery module.