Modeling and control battery aging in energy harvesting systems

Energy storage is a fundamental component for the development of sustainable and environment-aware technologies. One of the critical challenges that needs to be overcome is preserving the State of Health (SoH) in energy harvesting systems, where bursty arrival of energy and load may severely degrade the battery. Tools from Markov process and Dynamic Programming theory are becoming an increasingly popular choice to control dynamics of these systems due to their ability to seamlessly incorporate heterogeneous components and support a wide range of applications. Mapping aging rate measures to fit within the boundaries of these tools is non-trivial. In this paper, a framework for modeling and controlling the aging rate of batteries based on Markov process theory is presented. Numerical results illustrate the tradeoff between battery degradation and task completion delay enabled by the proposed framework.