Active Cell Balancing Using Individual Cell Equalizer

In recent days electrical vehicles are gaining wide importance in the locomotive and automobile sector and essentially replacing the conventional IC engine. Electrical vehicles are usually powered by battery pack of several cells fashioned in a particular series-parallel configuration. For efficient utilization of energy in terms of charge from battery it requires a design of battery management system that can monitor and control certain functions like under voltage, over voltage, cell balancing. Cell balancing is a technique of equalizing every cells State of Charge (SoC) to extract optimal energy from battery and eliminates the uncertainty caused by cell unbalancing. Therefore, this paper proposes cell balancing technique using Individual Cell Equalizer (ICE). The method described uses buck-boost converter to transfer the charge from the cell with higher SoC to a cell with lower SoC. The cell balancing phenomenon is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink ® platform.