Leveraging Structures in Fault Diagnosis for Lithium-Ion Battery Packs

Lithium-ion battery packs consist of a varying number of single cells, designed to meet specific application requirements for output voltage and capacity. Effective fault diagnosis in these battery packs is an essential prerequisite for ensuring their safe and reliable operation. To address this need, we introduce a novel model-based fault diagnosis approach. Our approach distinguishes itself by leveraging informative structural properties inherent in battery packs such as uniformity among the constituent cells, and sparsity of fault occurrences to enhance its fault diagnosis capabilities. The proposed approach formulates a moving horizon estimation (MHE) problem, incorporating such structural information to estimate different fault signals—specifically, internal short circuits, external short circuits, and voltage and current sensors faults. We conduct various simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach under different fault types and magnitudes. The obtained results validate the proposed approach and promise effective fault diagnosis for battery packs.