An Effective Method for Estimating State of Charge of Lithium-Ion Batteries Based on an Electrochemical Model and Nernst Equation

Lithium-ion batteries are generally regarded as a leading candidate for energy storage systems. The safe and reliable operation of lithium-ion batteries depends largely on accurate estimation of the state of charge (SOC), which requires an accurate battery model. Bearing strong mechanisms, the electrochemical model (EM) can mimic the battery dynamics with high fidelity, and thus the EM-based methods can produce more reliable SOC estimates. This paper proposes a novel EM-based SOC estimation method for lithium-ion batteries from the electrochemical mechanism perspective. Firstly, a single particle model is employed to gain a direct insight into the electrochemical reactions inside the battery, and it is found that the model output voltage and SOC are strongly related to the lithium-ion concentrations of solid phases. A simple negative voltage feedback module is then applied to observe the voltage error between the cell referenced terminal voltage and the model output voltage. To eliminate the voltage error and achieve a precise estimate, a quantitative relationship between the voltage error and corrected amount of lithium-ion concentrations is deduced based on the Nernst equation. The performance of proposed method has been systemically evaluated under different operating conditions, including various charging and discharging current rates, erroneous initial SOCs, and cell aging levels. Although an erroneous initial SOC of 50% is applied to the proposed algorithm, promising estimates with the mean absolute errors of 0.22% and 1.35% can be still achieved under the constant and dynamic loading conditions, respectively.