A Switch-Reduced Multicell-to-Multicell Battery Equalizer Based on Full-Bridge Bipolar-Resonant LC Converter

Abstract

Many battery equalizers have been proposed to achieve voltage consistency between series connected battery cells. Among them, the multicell-to-multicell (MC2MC) equalizers, which can directly transfer energy from consecutive more-charged cells to less-charged cells, can enable fast balancing and a high efficiency. However, due to the limitations of the equalizers, it is not possible to achieve fast equalization and reduce the size of the circuit at the same time. Therefore, a MC2MC equalizer based on a full-bridge bipolar-resonant LC Converter (FBBRLCC) is proposed in this paper, which not only implements MC2MC equalization, but also greatly reduces the circuit size by reducing the number of switches by nearly half. A mathematical model and simulation comparison with conventional equalizers are used to illustrate the high-speed equalization performance of the proposed equalizer and excellent balancing efficiency. An experimental prototype for eight cells is built to verify the performance of the proposed FBBRLCC equalizer and the balancing efficiencies in different operating modes are from 85.19% to 88.77% with the average power from 1.888 W to 14.227 W.

Keywords

• battery equalizers
• multicell-to-multicell (MC2MC) equalizers
• LC converter
• voltage consistency
• circuit size