Online Model Identification Method of Vanadium Redox Flow Battery Based on Time-varying Forgetting Factor Recursive Least Squares

Vanadium redox flow battery (VRB) energy storage system has been widely utilized in renewable energy applications such as wind power integration and green buildings. An online electrical model of VRB is needed to monitor and estimate battery states by using real time data since the internal parameters of battery are varying during operation. In this paper, an improved second-order Thevenin model is proposed to describe the operating characteristics of VRB. To overcome the drawback of recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm in tracking parameter identification, this paper proposes a method based on time-varying forgetting factor recursive least Squares (TFF-RLS) algorithm to identify model parameters. According to the data collected by the pulse charging experiment, the RLS algorithm and the TFF-RLS algorithm are used to identify the model parameters. Experiments are carried out on a 5kWh/3kWh VRB experimental platform in Wuhan University of Technology. Two online identification methods are compared. The results show that the TFF-RLS method demonstrates a better performance on tracking the variation of parameters dynamically, and improving estimation accuracy compared with the RLS method.