A Cost-Effective Passive/Active Hybrid Equalizer Circuit Design

This paper proposes a novel hybrid equalizer circuit (HEC) for a battery management system (BMS) to implement the passive HEC (P-HEC), active HEC (A-HEC), or active/passive (AP-HEC) with the same equalizer circuit architecture. The advantages of an HEC are that it is simple, cost-effective, highly e...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEnergies (Basel) Vol. 15; no. 6; p. 2000
Main Authors Sun, Chein-Chung, Chou, Chun-Hung, Lin, Yu-Liang, Huang, Yu-Hua
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.03.2022
Subjects
active equalizer circuit (AEC)
Arrays
Batteries
Battery chargers
battery management system (BMS)
Circuit design
Component reliability
Design
Electric converters
Electric vehicles
Energy efficiency
Energy storage
Equalizers
hybrid equalizer circuit (HEC)
MOSFETs
passive equalizer circuit (PEC)
Power management
Service life assessment
Storage systems
Waste heat
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Summary:This paper proposes a novel hybrid equalizer circuit (HEC) for a battery management system (BMS) to implement the passive HEC (P-HEC), active HEC (A-HEC), or active/passive (AP-HEC) with the same equalizer circuit architecture. The advantages of an HEC are that it is simple, cost-effective, highly energy efficient, and fail safe. The P-HEC can further use a cooling fan or heater instead of a conventional resistor as a power dissipation element to convert the energy of the waste heat generated by the resistor to adjust the battery temperature. Even if the P-HEC uses the resistor to consume energy as in conventional methods, the P-HEC still dramatically improves the component lifetime and reliability of the BMS because the waste heat generated by the equalizer resistor is outside of the BMS board. Three significant advantages of an A-HEC are its (1) low cost, (2) small volume, and (3) higher energy efficiency than the conventional active equalizer circuits (AECs). In the HEC design, the MOSFETs of the switch array do not need high-speed switching to transfer energy as conventional AECs with DC/DC converter architecture because the A-HEC uses an isolated battery charger to charge the string cell. Therefore, the switch array is equal to a cell selector with a simple ON/OFF function. In summary, the HEC provides a small volume, cost-effective, high efficiency, and fail-safe equalizer circuit design to satisfy cell balancing demands for all kinds of electric vehicles (EVs) and energy storage systems (ESSs).
ISSN:1996-1073
1996-1073
DOI:10.3390/en15062000