Reduced Order Model of Common Battery Pack Architectures for Assessment of Cell Parameter Variation Propagation

Nowadays, the series-parallel (SP) and the parallel-series (PS) configurations represent the main architectures considered for designing a battery pack. In both architectures, cell-to-cell parameters’ variations due to manufacturing tolerances, thermal gradients, and cell degradation can strongly impact the overall performance of battery packs. However, the effect of the parameter variation on the pack performance changes depending on the architecture and the number of cells. This manuscript aims at providing a method for the assessment of the impact of cell-to-cell parameters’ variations due to potential different aging and thermal conditions for the cells in a generic SP and PS pack architecture. For this purpose, a generalized reduced order equivalent circuit model for the battery pack is defined, leading to a set of steady-state equations for easily and systematically calculating the current and voltage imbalances due to capacity and internal resistance variations independently from the pack architecture and the number of cells. A parametric analysis is reported for quantitatively evaluating the severity of the imbalances due to the cell-to-cell parameters’ variations for both battery pack architectures. The results of the comparative analysis demonstrate that PS architecture is more impacted by parameters’ variations with respect to the SP one, since a higher current imbalance is always obtained. The difference in the severity of the current imbalance in the pack architectures strongly increases as the number of series-connected cells rises. Moreover, among the cell parameters’ variations, a major impact of the capacity imbalance on the reduction of the overall performance of the battery pack is observed.