A Control Strategy and Cell Balancing Speed Analysis Considering the Integrated Circuit LTC3300-1

One of the most important tasks for a Battery Management System (BMS) is the charge distribution among the cells in the battery, a process called cell balancing. This process can be done by two types of circuits, dissipative and non-dissipative, the second one uses intermediary components such as DC-DC converters to move energy among the lithium-ion battery (LiB) cells. As most of the works mainly focus on the theoretical circuits, without considering the available commercial solutions, in this work the non-dissipative circuit based on the Flyback bidirectional DC-DC converter, LTC3300-1 from Analog Devices, is employed to balance a LiB. Then, a cell balancing strategy was developed and used to carry out a study, through numerical simulations, to obtain the IC cell balancing speed according to the number of stacked ICs and the cell balancing current. The results showed that, when the cell balancing current is constant, the cell balancing speed depends on the physical position of the cells to be balanced. Also, an increase in the balancing current means an increase at the same rate in the cell balancing speed. Finally, it was shown that the number of stacked ICs plays a fundamental role in the cell balancing speed.