State of Charge Estimation of Lithium-Ion Batteries Based on Temporal Convolutional Network and Transfer Learning

Accurate estimation of the state of charge (SOC) is critical for the normal use of lithium-ion battery equipment like electric vehicles. However, the SOC of lithium-ion battery is not available by direct measure, but can only indirectly be estimated by measurable variables. According to the nonlinear characteristics between the measured values and SOC during the working period of lithium-ion batteries, we propose a method to estimate the SOC of lithium-ion batteries with Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN). The measured values of voltage, current, and temperature during the use of lithium-ion batteries can be directly mapped to accurate SOC in this method without using a battery model or adaptive filter. The network can self-learning and update parameters by being fed datasets collected under various working conditions and then obtain a model that can correctly estimate SOC under different estimation conditions. In addition, it can also be applied to different types of lithium-ion batteries through transfer learning with only a small amount of battery data. At various ambient temperature conditions, the average MAE estimated by the proposed method is 0.67% for all the tests, which proves that the TCN network is an effective tool to estimate the SOC of lithium-ion batteries.