Performance Enhancement of a Hybrid Battery-Supercapacitor EV Energy Storage System

The energy consumption pattern of the Lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery bank in Electric Vehicles (EVs) exhibits rapid fluctuations for different driving cycles, leading to battery degradation and shortening its lifetime. This paper presents an energy management strategy for a hybrid EV energy storage system (HESS) that integrates the EV battery with a bank of supercapacitors (SC), aiming to reduce the degradation rate of EV batteries. The presented work uses data from driving simulations conducted on Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) traffic simulator tool for a low-speed zone, particularly a university campus. A MATLAB/Simulink-based simulation is conducted for the proposed energy management strategy to demonstrate how the system manages the energy flow between the battery and the supercapacitors. Results reveal that the proposed model is able to reduce the EV battery temperature and hence reduce its degradation by approximately 50% compared to the situation when the Li-ion battery is solely used.