Comparative Analysis of Unipolar and Bipolar Control of Modular Battery for Thermal and State-of-Charge Balancing

Thermal and state-of-charge (SOC) imbalance is a well-known issue that causes nonuniform aging in batteries. The modular battery based on cascaded converters is a potential solution to this problem. This paper presents bipolar control (BPC) of a modular battery and compares it with previously proposed unipolar control (UPC) mode in terms of thermal/SOC balancing performance and energy efficiency. The BPC needs four-quadrant operation of a full-bridge (FB) converter using bipolar pulsewidth modulation (PWM) inside each module, whereas UPC only needs a half-bridge (HB) converter with unipolar PWM. The BPC, unlike UPC, enables charging of some cells while discharging others. An averaged state-space electrothermal battery model is derived for a convex formulation of the balancing control problem. The control problem is formulated on a constrained linear quadratic (LQ) form and solved in a model predictive control (MPC) framework using one-step-ahead prediction. The simulation results show that BPC, without even requiring load current variations, gives better balancing performance than UPC but at the cost of reduced efficiency. The UPC requires at least current direction reversal for acceptable balancing performance. In short, the UPC is a more cost- and energy-efficient solution for electric vehicle (EV) and plug-in hybrid EV applications, whereas the BPC can be beneficial in applications involving load cycles with high current pulses of long duration.