A Battery Balancing Auxiliary Power Module With Predictive Control for Electrified Transportation

This paper proposes the integration of the auxiliary power module (APM) and nondissipative balancing hardware of a high-voltage battery. The proposed battery-balancing APM is projected to reduce the costs of nondissipative battery balancing by providing two functionalities: balancing of the high-voltage battery cells and charging of the low-voltage battery. This paper proposes two model predictive control strategies that address simultaneous balancing and charging. Both approaches make unbalanced charge available that increases the effective capacity of the high-voltage battery. The monolithic controller solves the balancing and charging problem as a single optimization problem. In contrast, the decoupled controller defines a separate control law for charging to achieve a higher bandwidth, e.g., for systems without dedicated low-voltage battery. The battery-balancing APM concept is validated on a software-in-the-loop and experimental test bench.