Influence of Voltage Balancing on the Temperature Distribution of a Li-Ion Battery Module

Temperature is one of the key factors when working with lithium-ion battery modules due to its influence in safety, performance, and lifespan concerns in these devices. High working temperatures reduce the available capacity of each cell within the module after several cycles due to aging; nonuniform temperature distributions in the module lead to different aging processes in each cell, and thus it will be impossible to take advantage of all the energy available in the Li-ion storage system, because the most aged cell will limit the available energy. This paper is focused on the minimization of the maximum temperature gradient of a battery module for high depth of discharge applications to avoid different aging processes of the cells within the module. Voltage balancing is proposed as a solution for this purpose, and different strategies and their results are presented in this paper.