Physics-Informed Fractional-Order Recurrent Neural Network for Fast Battery Degradation with Vehicle Charging Snippets

To handle and manage battery degradation in electric vehicles (EVs), various capacity estimation methods have been proposed and can mainly be divided into traditional modeling methods and data-driven methods. For realistic conditions, data-driven methods take the advantage of simple application. However, state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) algorithms are still kinds of black-box models; thus, the algorithms do not have a strong ability to describe the inner reactions or degradation information of batteries. Due to a lack of interpretability, machine learning may not learn the degradation principle correctly and may need to depend on big data quality. In this paper, we propose a physics-informed recurrent neural network (PIRNN) with a fractional-order gradient for fast battery degradation estimation in running EVs to provide a physics-informed neural network that can make algorithms learn battery degradation mechanisms. Incremental capacity analysis (ICA) was conducted to extract aging characteristics, which could be selected as the inputs of the algorithm. The fractional-order gradient descent (FOGD) method was also applied to improve the training convergence and embedding of battery information during backpropagation; then, the recurrent neural network was selected as the main body of the algorithm. A battery dataset with fast degradation from ten EVs with a total of 5697 charging snippets were constructed to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed PIRNN with ICA and the FOGD method could control the relative error within 5% for most snippets of the ten EVs. The algorithm could even achieve a stable estimation accuracy (relative error < 3%) during three-quarters of a battery’s lifetime, while for a battery with dramatic degradation, it was difficult to maintain such high accuracy during the whole battery lifetime.