A Novel Self-Reconfigurable Battery Pack Design with and without Active Cell Balancing

In electric vehicle industry, rechargeable multicell battery packs commonly with fixed configurations are adopted. Such fixed battery configurations have several drawbacks, including limited fault tolerance during unusual operating situations, poor cell state variation management, etc. Thus, this article proposes a self-reconfigurable battery pack design considering two scenarios: with and without active cell balancing. Herein, the issue of cell state variation is mostly solved by the proposed configuration mode, and further monitoring, control, and protection can be easily appended to accomplish other functionalities, for example, meeting dynamic voltage requirement. Each proposed design is validated by simulation results for a six-cell polymer lithium-ion battery pack. The proposed design can maximally utilize the battery's capacity and help to protect cells from over-charging and over-discharging as well. This research could be further extended to other application scenarios involving wide-range dynamic voltage requirements.