Charge equalizer design method based on battery modularization

The charge equalizer design for a series connected battery string is very challenging because it needs to satisfy many requirements such as implementation possibility, equalization speed, equalization efficiency, controller simplicity, size and cost issues, voltage and current stress, and so on. Numerous algorithms and circuits were developed to meet the above demands and some interesting results have been obtained. However, for a large number of cells, for example, eighty or more batteries, the previous approaches might not satisfy the above requirement easily. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a charge equalizer design method based on a battery modularization technique. In this method, a very long battery string is divided into several modules and then an intramodule equalizer and an outer-module equalizer are designed. This battery modularization scheme effectively reduces the number of cells that we consider in an equalizer design procedure; thus, the design of a charge equalizer becomes much easier. Furthermore, by applying the previously verified charge equalizers to the intramodule and the outer-module, we can make the equalizer design more flexible. Several examples and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the usefulness of the charge equalizer design method.