Methods for state-of-charge determination and their applications

State-of-charge (SOC) determination becomes an increasingly important issue in all the applications that include a battery. Former operation strategies made use of voltage limits only to protect the battery against deep discharge and overcharge. Currently, battery operation is changing to what could rather be called battery management than simply protection. For this improved battery control, the battery SOC is a key factor. Much research work has been done in recent years to improve SOC determination. Operational conditions differ for batteries in, for example, photovoltaic applications, (hybrid)-electric vehicles or telecommunications. Hence, a given method for SOC calculation will be more suitable for a certain application than for another. The authors introduce commonly used methods for SOC determination and establish a relationship between the advantages of the different methods and the most common applications. As a main illustration, the analysis of Kalman filter technique for lead-acid battery SOC determination are presented and some results for other calculation methods as well.