An integrated design of active balancing and redundancy at module level for Electric Vehicle batteries

This paper proposes an integrated design of active balancing and battery redundancy at module level to maximize the performance and the reliability of the battery packs of Electric Vehicles (EVs) economically. Through the bidirectional flyback converter and the selection switches, the charge from the battery pack can be transferred to the selected module or vice versa to perform balancing. The design allows disconnection of faulty modules whilst maintaining the power supplied to the vehicle to avoid the risks of immediate power cut-off. Analytical studies and experimental results from the laboratory prototype are presented to verify the performance of the proposed design.