Sensorless Individual Cell Temperature Measurement by Means of Impedance Spectroscopy Using Standard Battery Management Systems of Electric Vehicles

Lithium ion technology is state of the art for actual hybrid and electrical vehicles. It is well known that lithium ion performance and safety characteristics strongly depend on temperature. Thus, reliable temperature measurement and control concepts for lithium ion cells are mandatory for applications in electrical cars. Temperature sensors for all individual cells increase the battery complexity and cost of a battery management system. Normally, temperature is measured on module level in current battery packs, without observation of the individual cell temperature. Sensorless cell impedance-based temperature measurement concepts have been published and are validated in laboratory studies. Dedicated test equipment is usually applied, which is not useful for automotive series application. This work describes a practical approach to enable impedance-based sensorless internal temperature measurement for all individual cells using state-of-the art battery management system components. Excitation is generated by DC to DC converters of a standard commercial active balancing systems. For data acquisition, also an established commercial battery monitoring circuit unit is used. To overcome bandwidth limitations, a sub-sampling scheme is presented, which allows to determine the impedance at higher frequencies than the sampling rate. Impedance calculation is performed by means of efficient digital signal processing concepts with low demand on memory and processing power. Thus, the method can be integrated into existing battery management systems with low implementation effort. The concept is demonstrated on a 4-cell submodule of 26 Ah automotive Li-ion cells. It can also be applied in low-cost battery management systems without active balancing capability.