Charging/discharging monitoring and simulation platform for Li-ion batteries

A charging/discharging monitoring and simulation platform for Li-ion batteries is designed and implemented in this paper. Most of chargers are designed based on the rated voltage and/or current of batteries without taking the battery parameters and energy sources of chargers into account. For example, the utilization of renewable energies such as Photovoltaic (PV) as the energy source of the charger has been treated as a new energy option recently. However, due to the unstable energy characteristic of PV, more analysis and investigation should be conducted for the design of PV-based charger. Therefore, a well designed charging/discharging monitoring and simulation platform that can take unstable energy characteristic and battery parameters' variation into account and help the charger deigns is desirable. The proposed platform can be used to monitor the voltage and current in the charging/discharging process, to calculate the circuit parameters of battery model and to simulate the charging/discharging process. A PV-based charger for Li-ion batteries is implemented in this paper and some experiments and simulations for the designed charger are conducted. Experimental results that agree well with simulated results demonstrate the validity of the proposed platform.