1. Introduction
Lithium-ion power batteries are widely used in electric vehicles (EVs), owing to their advantages of high energy density, low self-discharge rate, long cycle life, and no memory effect [
1]. To ensure the safe, efficient, and stable operation of the power batteries, it is essential to manage the batteries effectively [
2]. It is known that the state of charge (SOC) serves as an important indicator to characterize the remaining battery capacity. Therefore, an accurate SOC estimation is the basis for preventing over-charge and over-discharge, and for equilibrium processing. Accurate SOC estimation is the core of an effective battery management system (BMS) [
3,
4,
5].
An effective battery model is a prerequisite for estimating the SOC of a battery. A model that is not effective directly reduces the accuracy of the SOC estimation algorithm, and could even cause the estimation algorithm to diverge directly in severe cases. There are three main types of working lithium-ion battery models: the black-box models, the electrochemical models, and the equivalent circuit models (ECMs) [
6]. These three types of models describe the characteristics of the lithium-ion batteries from different detail levels [
7]. The black-box models are similar to a linear or nonlinear mapping function. This function reflects the characteristics of battery voltage response, whereas ignores the internal mechanism of the battery and has no physical existence. The electrochemical models contain many equations and parameters, but the simulation accuracy of the battery under complex working conditions is low. The ECMs are used to simulate the external operating characteristics of the battery by the matching of electronic components and are widely used in battery SOC estimation [
8]. The pseudo-two-dimensional electrochemical mechanism model proposed by Doyle et al. [
9] is often used as a full-order reference mechanism model, and it is also used to evaluate and test other simplified mechanism models. Wang et al. [
10] established a nonlinear black-box battery model, and the verification under federal urban driving schedule (FUDS) operating conditions showed that the relative error of voltage was within 3.8%. Plett et al. [
11] developed the commonly used ECMs in detail, including internal resistance models, models considering hysteresis effects, etc. Kim et al. [
12] proposed a hybrid battery model consisting of a KiBaM model and a dual-polarization model (DPM), which can simultaneously describe the external dynamic characteristics and the recovery effect of the battery. Hu et al. [
13] used a second-order fractional-order model to predict the terminal voltage under FUDS cycling conditions, and the average relative error does not exceed 0.1%, which proved the high accuracy of the model.
At present, the SOC estimation methods used both locally and internationally include: the ampere-hour (Ah) integration method [
14], electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) method [
15], open-circuit voltage (OCV) method [
16], internal resistance method [
1], particle filter (PF) [
17], Kalman filter (KF) [
18], fuzzy logic (FL) [
19], artificial neural network (ANN) [
20], support vector machine (SVM) [
21], and relevance vector machine (RVM) [
22]. The authors in [
23] critically reviewed the existing SOC estimation methods in the past five years and introduced the basic principles and main disadvantages of various methods. Among these methods, the KF is an optimized autoregressive data filtering algorithm [
24], which utilizes the principle of minimum mean square error to achieve an optimal state estimation for a complex dynamic system. Not only does the KF correct the initial error of the system but it also effectively suppresses the noise in the actual measurement process [
8]. This feature makes the KF stand out among the current SOC estimation models. Therefore, a variety of improved algorithms have also been derived, such as the extended Kalman filter (EKF) [
25], the adaptive unscented Kalman filter (AUKF) [
26], and the central difference Kalman filter (CDEF) [
27]. In 2004, Gregory L Plett [
11] employed the EKF algorithm to perform the battery state and parameters’ estimation based on the ECM. He proposed an EKF algorithm as the core control method, which was supported and improved by many researchers [
28,
29,
30]. Xu et al. [
31] proposed a fractional-order model (FOM) for SOC estimation. Compared to the integer-order model, the accuracy of the SOC estimation is significantly improved with the FOM. Lai et al. [
32] combined the Ah integration method and the EKF to estimate the SOC based on multi-model global identification. The results proved the robustness of the algorithm. Xu et al. [
33] employed the double Kalman filter (DKF) algorithm to estimate the SOC of a lithium-ion battery based on the temperature-dependent DPM. After verification, the battery SOC estimation error could be kept within the range of ± 0.004 under different temperature conditions.
At present, most works in the existing literature focus on the SOC estimation algorithm, and the effects of operating conditions on SOC estimation are barely considered. In this study, we studied the influence of different operating conditions on SOC estimation based on different battery models. Simulation results show that the SOC estimation accuracy of the DPM and the FOM is satisfactory, and the errors are within the range of ±0.06. Under any operating condition, the SOC estimation error of the FOM is always less than that of the DPM, but the adaptability of the FOM is not as good as that of the DPM.
This paper is organized as follows: first, we establish a DPM and a FOM. Second, we apply a mixed-swarm-based cooperative particle swarm optimization (MCPSO) algorithm to identify the battery parameters. The accuracy of the model is verified by using dynamic stress test (DST) operating condition. Third, a hybrid Kalman filter (HKF) algorithm is used to estimate the SOC of the battery, comprehensively utilizing the Ah integration method, KF, and EKF. Finally, the SOC estimation results of the DPM and the FOM under DST, FUDS, and hybrid pulse power characteristic (HPPC) cycling conditions are analyzed by comparing six sets of experiments.
2. Establishment of Lithium-Ion Battery Model
The ECMs (integer-order models and FOMs) are the most widely used type of battery models in various battery-related research because of their clear physical representation, ease of mathematical analysis, and simple parameter identification [
34]. Among these models, considering the trade-off between prediction accuracy and structural complexity, the DPM stands out from all integer-order models [
35]. However, the integer-order models cannot accurately reflect the electrochemical reactions inside the battery. Therefore, in [
36], the authors have used fractional-order impedance elements to improve the integer-order model further. This is because, from the perspective of EIS, a circuit composed of fractional-order impedance elements can better fit the impedance characteristics of a lithium-ion battery, and thus has better applications in battery principle analysis, battery modeling, and state estimation. To investigate the effects of different operating conditions on the battery SOC estimation, the SOC estimation experiments under different operating conditions were conducted in this study, based on the DPM and FOM.
Figure 1a shows the structure of the DPM, and
Figure 1b shows the structure of the FOM, where
Ud represents the battery terminal voltage,
stands for the OCV, the current is denoted by
I,
indicates the Ohmic internal resistance, the polarization internal resistances are represented by
and
,
and
stand for the polarization capacitances, the constant phase elements are denoted by
CPE1 and
CPE2, and
W indicates the Wahlberg element.
2.1. Establishment of Lithium-Ion Battery DPM
The terminal voltage of the battery is shown as follows:
The changes in the rates of voltages
and
are
and
, respectively, which can be expressed by Equations (2) and (3):
The definition of SOC is presented in Equations (4) as follows:
where the values of SOC at time
t and
t0 are denoted by
SOC(t) and
SOC(t0), respectively,
Q stands for the maximum available capacity, the charging and discharging efficiency is represented by
. Supposing
indicates the sampling time, discretizing Equations (1), (2), and (4) as follows:
The parameters to be identified are:
2.2. Establishment of Lithium-Ion Battery FOM
The transfer function is presented in Equation (9) for the lithium-ion battery FOM as follows:
where
indicate the impedances of
CPE1 and
CPE2 element, respectively. The impedance of the Wahlberg element is denoted by
.
Assuming the system input is
u = I(t), and the output is
y = UOCV (t) −
Ud(t), then the system model is denoted by a fractional calculus equation, as shown in Equation (10).
Here, the fractional-orders of CPE1 and CPE2 are represented by α and β, and the fractional-order of the Wahlberg element is denoted by γ. The parameters Dγ, Dα, Dβ, , , , indicate the fractional-order operators.
The definition of SOC of the FOM is given by:
where
Cn is the rated capacity of the battery;
η stands for the battery coulomb efficiency.
By using calculations as presented in [
13], we can transform Equation (10) into a first-order difference equation as follows:
Discretizing Equation (11):
The FOMs of lithium-ion batteries can be established using Equations (12) and (13), and the parameters that the model needs to identify are as follows:
2.3. Model Parameter Identification
2.3.1. Model Parameter Identification
The equipment employed in our experimentation included a battery testing device (BTS-5 V 100 A), an incubator (HL404C), a charging and discharging facility, and a computer. The sampling time of the battery test system was set to 0.1 s.
Figure 2 shows the configuration of the battery testing system. The A123 ternary lithium-ion soft pack batteries were selected as the experimental objects, and their specifications can be seen in
Table 1.
The OCV is an important parameter of the lithium-ion battery, and it usually has a relatively fixed corresponding relationship with the SOC. By testing the OCV at different SOC points, the SOC-OCV curve of the battery can be drawn. Generally, if the lithium-ion battery is left in the open state for a sufficiently long period, the measured battery terminal voltage can be approximately considered as the battery’s OCV [
37]. According to the Empirical Formula (15) and the fitted data of
Table 2,
Figure 3 shows the connection between OCV and SOC [
11]. The fitted parameters for the OCV-SOC curve are shown in
Table 3.
To simulate cells operating in EVs and obtain their characteristics, static capacity test (SCT), DST, FUDS, and HPPC tests were performed at an environmental temperature of 25 °C. Later, the MCPSO algorithm [
13] was employed to identify the parameters of the above-mentioned DPM and FOM in the time domain. The results of parameter identification are shown in
Table 4 and
Table 5.
2.3.2. Model Accuracy Verification
In this study, the DST test cycle conditions are used to verify the model accuracy for both the DPM and the FOM. The battery current is used as the model input variable so that the corresponding model voltage output can be measured and plotted.
Figure 4 shows the current profile of DST operating condition. The comparison chart and error chart of the DPM output voltage and measured voltage are shown in
Figure 5. The comparison chart and error chart of the FOM output voltage and measured voltage are shown in
Figure 6.
Figure 5 and
Figure 6 show that the output voltage curves and measured voltage curves of the DPM and the FOM are highly fitted. In addition, the voltage error of the DPM did not exceed 40 mV, and the voltage error of the FOM was kept within 20 mV. This shows that the established model yielded high accuracy under DST working conditions. However, the accuracy of the FOM was higher than that of the DPM. The quantitative results are presented for comparison in
Table 6.