Comparative Study of Passive and Active Equalizers for Lithium-Ion Cells

In recent years, approximately hundred topologies have been studied for Li-ion cell balance. In this paper, some equalizer topologies, comprising classical passive and active equalizers, are considered. The comparison considered several aspects, and for each of them, different Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) were defined. The most important KPIs are related to balancing time, capacity reduction due to balancing, weight, cost and volume. Finally, the KPIs were compared to select the topology with the best performance.