Co-Estimating State of Charge and Capacity of Automotive Lithium-Ion Batteries Under Deep Degradation Using Multiple Estimators

Since battery systems typically account for over 40% of the cost of an electric vehicle, their mid-life replacements are exceptional. Therefore, the battery’s lifespan must exceed that of the vehicle. To ensure long-term and safe use, accurate state-of-charge (SOC) estimation must be maintained throughout the battery’s lifespan. This requires appropriate updates to parameters, such as capacity, in the battery model. In this context, dual extended Kalman filters, which simultaneously estimate both states and parameters, have gained interest. While existing reports on simultaneous estimators seemed promising, our study found that they performed well under low levels of battery aging but encountered issues at higher levels. Accurately reflecting the actual physicochemical changes of the parameters in aging cells is challenging for two reasons: the limited number of measurements of terminal voltage available for numerous parameters, and the weak observability of the capacity. Therefore, we combined the simultaneous estimator with a capacity estimator operated separately during charging and a sequential estimator specialized for an enhanced self-correcting model, achieving SOC accuracy within 5% even when the SOH decreased by 30%. However, there is still much work to be carried out to implement sequential estimators in battery management systems operating in real time with limited computational resources.