Accurate Online Battery Impedance Measurement Method with Low Output Voltage Ripples on Power Converters

The conventional online battery impedance measurement method works by perturbing the duty cycle of the DC-DC power converter and measuring the response of the battery voltage and current. This periodical duty cycle perturbation will continuously generate large voltage ripples at the output of power converters. These large ripples will not easily be removed due to the high amplitude and wide frequency range and would be a challenge to meet tight output regulation. To solve this problem, this paper presents a new online battery impedance measurement technique by inserting a small switched resistor circuit (SRC) into the converter. The first contribution of this work is that the perturbation source is moved from the main switch to the input-side of the converter, so the ripples are reduced. The analysis and experimental results of the proposed method show a reduction of 16-times compared with the conventional method. The second contribution tackles the possible change of the battery state of charge (SOC) during the online battery measurement process, which will inevitably influence the impedance measurement accuracy. In this proposed method, battery impedance at multiple frequencies can be measured simultaneously using only one perturbation to accelerate measurement speed and minimize possible SOC change. The experimental impedance results coincide with a high-accuracy laboratory battery impedance analyzer.