Online estimation of state-of-health for lithium ion batteries based on charge curves

Usable capacity refers to the maximum capacity in theory that a fully charged battery can release, and is often used as an indicator in state of health (SOH) estimation for lithium ion batteries. The traditional method for measuring usable capacity is mainly based on voltage data in the discharge process with a constant current. However, the discharge current of a lithium ion battery in operation always fluctuates due to load changes, which makes the traditional method difficult for realizing online capacity measurement. To overcome the above problems, a novel approach is proposed in this paper to estimate the usable capacity and SOH of lithium ion batteries based on the charge curve. The time intervals between two voltages and currents during charging are used as the health factors to predict the usable capacity, which is then used to perform the SOH estimation. Experiments are implemented based on data provided by the NASA Ames Prognostics Center of Excellence. Results confirm that the proposed method performs well in online estimation of SOH.