Smart Battery Concept: A Battery that Can Breathe

Lithium-ion batteries are used in a wide range of applications such as electric vehicles and energy storage systems. However, the aging of the battery cell is inevitable. Especially for battery packs with hundreds of battery cells connected in series/parallel, the aging process will be aggravated due to the difference between battery cells, leading to a limited lifetime and reliability issues. This paper introduces the concept of Smart Battery that combines advanced power electronics and artificial intelligence (AI) intending to develop a new generation of battery solutions for transportation and grid storage. The key feature for controlling the lifetime is the bypass device, a half-bridge that can control individual cell-level load management without affecting the load. An advanced AI-based lifetime controller is trained to recognize the signs of stressed battery cells and decide to insert rest time, resulting in a pulsed current operation. Finally, the following features are expected to be achieved: increased safety and reliability by fault-tolerant operation, user-controlled lifetime, and software reconfiguration for 2nd life applications. The early experimental results are promising, showing cycle lifetime extension over 50%.