3-D Temperature Field Reconstruction for a Lithium-Ion Battery Pack: A Distributed Kalman Filtering Approach

Despite the ever-increasing use across different sectors, the lithium-ion batteries (LiBs) have continually seen serious concerns over their thermal vulnerability. The LiB operation involves heat generation and buildup effect, which manifests itself strongly, in the form of highly uneven thermal distribution, for a LiB pack consisting of multiple cells. If not well monitored and managed, the heating may accelerate aging and cause unwanted side reactions. In extreme cases, it will even cause fires and explosions. Toward addressing this threat, this brief, for the first time, seeks to reconstruct the 3-D temperature field of a LiB pack in real time. The major challenge lies in how to acquire a high-fidelity reconstruction with constrained computation time. In this brief, a 3-D thermal model is established first for a LiB pack configured in series, which captures the spatial thermal behavior with a combination of high integrity and low complexity. Given the model, the standard Kalman filter is then distributed to attain temperature field estimation with substantially reduced computational complexity. The arithmetic operation analysis and the numerical simulation illustrate that the proposed distributed estimation achieves a comparable accuracy as the centralized approach but with much less computation.