Active charge balancing for Li-ion battery stacks

Abstract

The Automotive System Engineering group of Infineon Technologies AG in Munich was assigned the task to develop an E-Cart — with the electrical features of a hybrid car driven by Lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery stack. he simple conventional solution — dissipating power for charge equalization will need to be replaced by an active energy shift between the cells. A fruitless search through the available literature — only basic principles have been published — forced the team to develop its own know-how. The resulting active system has much better performance at material costs comparable to a passive solution.