No Arabic abstract
Lithium-ion battery packs are usually composed of hundreds of cells arranged in series and parallel connections. The proper functioning of these complex devices requires suitable Battery Management Systems (BMSs). Advanced BMSs rely on mathematical models to assure safety and high performance. While many approaches have been proposed for the management of single cells, the control of multiple cells has been less investigated and usually relies on simplified models such as equivalent circuit models. This paper addresses the management of a battery pack in which each cell is explicitly modelled as the Single Particle Model with electrolyte and thermal dynamics. A nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC) is presented for optimally charging the battery pack while taking voltage and temperature limits on each cell into account. Since the computational cost of nonlinear MPC grows significantly with the complexity of the underlying model, a sensitivity-based MPC (sMPC) is proposed, in which the model adopted is obtained by linearizing the dynamics along a nominal trajectory that is updated over time. The resulting sMPC optimizations are quadratic programs which can be solved in real-time even for large battery packs (e.g. fully electric motorbike with 156 cells) while achieving the same performance of the nonlinear MPC.
The rapidly growing use of lithium-ion batteries across various industries highlights the pressing issue of optimal charging control, as charging plays a crucial role in the health, safety and life of batteries. The literature increasingly adopts model predictive control (MPC) to address this issue, taking advantage of its capability of performing optimization under constraints. However, the computationally complex online constrained optimization intrinsic to MPC often hinders real-time implementation. This paper is thus proposed to develop a framework for real-time charging control based on explicit MPC (eMPC), exploiting its advantage in characterizing an explicit solution to an MPC problem, to enable real-time charging control. The study begins with the formulation of MPC charging based on a nonlinear equivalent circuit model. Then, multi-segment linearization is conducted to the original model, and applying the eMPC design to the obtained linear models leads to a charging control algorithm. The proposed algorithm shifts the constrained optimization to offline by precomputing explicit solutions to the charging problem and expressing the charging law as piecewise affine functions. This drastically reduces not only the online computational costs in the control run but also the difficulty of coding. Extensive numerical simulation and experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed eMPC charging control framework and algorithm. The research results can potentially meet the needs for real-time battery management running on embedded hardware.
Electric vehicles (EVs) have been growing rapidly in popularity in recent years and have become a future trend. It is an important aspect of user experience to know the Remaining Charging Time (RCT) of an EV with confidence. However, it is difficult to find an algorithm that accurately estimates the RCT for vehicles in the current EV market. The maximum RCT estimation error of the Tesla Model X can be as high as 60 minutes from a 10 % to 99 % state-of-charge (SOC) while charging at direct current (DC). A highly accurate RCT estimation algorithm for electric vehicles is in high demand and will continue to be as EVs become more popular. There are currently two challenges to arriving at an accurate RCT estimate. First, most commercial chargers cannot provide requested charging currents during a constant current (CC) stage. Second, it is hard to predict the charging current profile in a constant voltage (CV) stage. To address the first issue, this study proposes an RCT algorithm that updates the charging accuracy online in the CC stage by considering the confidence interval between the historical charging accuracy and real-time charging accuracy data. To solve the second issue, this study proposes a battery resistance prediction model to predict charging current profiles in the CV stage, using a Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network (NN). The test results demonstrate that the RCT algorithm proposed in this study achieves an error rate improvement of 73.6 % and 84.4 % over the traditional method in the CC and CV stages, respectively.
We describe the architecture and algorithms of the Adaptive Charging Network (ACN), which was first deployed on the Caltech campus in early 2016 and is currently operating at over 100 other sites in the United States. The architecture enables real-time monitoring and control and supports electric vehicle (EV) charging at scale. The ACN adopts a flexible Adaptive Scheduling Algorithm based on convex optimization and model predictive control and allows for significant over-subscription of electrical infrastructure. We describe some of the practical challenges in real-world charging systems, including unbalanced three-phase infrastructure, non-ideal battery charging behavior, and quantized control signals. We demonstrate how the Adaptive Scheduling Algorithm handles these challenges, and compare its performance against baseline algorithms from the deadline scheduling literature using real workloads recorded from the Caltech ACN and accurate system models. We find that in these realistic settings, our scheduling algorithm can improve operator profit by 3.4 times over uncontrolled charging and consistently outperforms baseline algorithms when delivering energy in highly congested systems.
The number of electric vehicles (EVs) is expected to increase. As a consequence, more EVs will need charging, potentially causing not only congestion at charging stations, but also in the distribution grid. Our goal is to illustrate how this gives rise to resource allocation and performance problems that are of interest to the Sigmetrics community.
The increased uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) leads to increased demand for electricity, and sometime pressure to power grids. Uncoordinated charging of EVs may result in putting pressure on distribution networks, and often some form of optimisation is required in the charging process. Optimal coordinated charging is a multi-objective optimisation problem in nature, with objective functions such as minimum price charging and minimum disruptions to the grid. In this manuscript, we propose a general multi-objective EV charging/discharging schedule (MOEVCS) framework, where the time of use (TOU) tariff is designed according to the load request at each time stamp. To obtain the optimal scheduling scheme and balance the competing benefits from different stakeholders, such as EV owners, EV charging stations (EVCS), and the grid operator, we design three conflicting objective functions including EV owner cost, EVCS profit, and the network impact. Moreover, we create four application scenarios with different charging request distributions over the investigated periods. We use a constraint multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) to solve the problem. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of MOEVCS in making a balance between three conflicting objectives.