Screening and Echelon Utilization of Lithium-Ion Power Batteries Using Clustering and Stepwise Regrouping Approach

Lithium-Ion battery (LIB) regrouping echelon utilization application scenarios are very wide, such as communication base station backup power supply, distributed energy storage system, photovoltaic power station, and so on. A key challenge is to ensure the consistency and scale of the regrouping LIB module. However, the inadequacies of the existing solutions have hindered the widespread adoption of echelon utilization. Hence, two optimized features are determined as the screening criteria. Meanwhile, fuzzy K-means (FCM) clustering algorithm and subtractive clustering algorithm (SCA) are proposed to combine to carry out LIB clustering efficiently. Furthermore, a new stepwise regrouping approach based on internal-external Euclidean distance is put forward to ensure the scale same of each LIB module and meet the direct echelon utilization application scenario requirements. Compared with the random regrouping method, the innovatively proposed multidimensional evaluation indexes, including maximum available capacity, terminal voltage, and state of charge (SOC), indicate that the consistency of the LIB module based on the proposed method in this article is obviously improved. The inconsistency evaluation indexes of each dimension are all decreased by more than 20%, which may contribute to the advancement of LIB regrouping echelon utilization.