Performance Analysis of Active and Passive Equalizer Circuits for Lithium-ion Cells

This paper proposes the analysis of the performance of two different architectures of Battery Management System (BMS). In particular, the passive equalizer circuit and an active one based on a Multiple Active Bridge (MAB) have been considered. The comparison has been performed in terms of equalization speed, power losses, complexity of both hardware and software implementation, size and cost. The different functionalities of the equalization process in both passive and active BMS have been verified in charging, discharging and idle state. Numerical and experimental analyses have been carried out to validate the performance of each equalizer circuit.