A Cooperative Cell Balancing Approach for Reconfigurable Supercapacitor Energy Storage Systems

Reconfigurable supercapacitor energy storage systems have been a promising choice for powering portable electronics since it omits the requirement of passive balancing elements such as resistors in the circuit, which improves the energy efficiency and alleviates the thermal heating effect of the circuit. However, the classical decentralized cell balancing method results in high voltage profiles of cells, which degrades the lifetime of cells in the repeated charging-discharging cycles. To address this challenge, we propose a cooperative cell balancing approach for reconfigurable supercapacitor energy storage systems. In the proposed method, cells communicate with their neighbours to synchronize cell voltages during the charging process. By carefully choosing the communication topology, the voltage profiles of cells can be maintained as low as possible, which alleviates the aging effects and prolongs the lifetime of cells. A laboratory hardware testbed has been built to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Extensive experiment results show that the proposed method can prolong the lifetime of cells considerably when compared with the decentralized control method.