A Battery Management System with Charge

Balancing and Aging Detection Based on ANN

Tsung-Wen Sun and Tsung-Heng Tsai
Department of Electrical Engineering
National Chung Cheng University
Chaiyi 62102, Taiwan, R.O.C.
ttsai@ee.ccu.edu.tw
2021 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) | 978-1-7281-9201-7/20/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ISCAS51556.2021.9401541

Abstract—A battery management system with aging

detection based on artificial neural network (ANN) for the state
of charge (SOC) balancing is proposed in this paper. The
charger adopts a single-inductor multiple-output architecture to
achieve charge balancing among different battery cells. In
constant current mode, the pulse charging is utilized to improve
the charging speed and slow down the aging rate. Moreover, an
ANN is proposed to detect the state of health (SOH) of the
battery cells and improve the accuracy of the SOC estimation.
TSMC 0.35-μm process and TensorFlow are used for
simulations. A 94% power efficiency of the charger is achieved.
The active area of this design is 1.5 x 1.5 mm2. Experimental
results show that 0.32% root-mean square errors for the SOC
estimation is obtained.
Keywords—Li-ion battery charger, cell balancing, pulse
charging, battery aging, battery model, artificial neural network
(ANN)
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, the number of electric vehicles and drones is
increasing and brings many conveniences to our daily life. In
order to extend the one-way travel distance or the duration of
operations, it is essential to connect multiple battery cells in
parallel to increase the overall capacity and instantaneous
output currents and/or in series to increase the output voltage
of the battery modules. Also, connecting various cells in
parallel and in series to form battery modules or battery packs
can moderate the risks of battery failures. However,
mismatched characteristics among battery cells often cause
the self-charging/discharging effects and result in temperature
rising and rapid aging, which will further cause greater
differences among cells and eventually bring safety issues. At
the same time, hot spots and connector aging need to be
carefully monitored to avoid dramatic damages to the battery
cells. Hence, a battery management system (BMS) is crucial
to mitigate the effects of the capacity fading [1], the aging rate
[2], and the state of charge (SOC) [3] of the battery packs.
Charge balancing is a conventional technique to maintain
similar charge states among battery cells, so that the battery
packs would not be limited by the weakest cell with severe
characteristics and fail to reach its optimal capacity. In [3], the
duality theorem is used to convert the series inductor
architecture to the equivalent parallel capacitor architecture.
Capacitor balance is employed to transfer energy between one
cell to another cell. The balancing speed is slow. In [4], single-
inductor single-input-multiple-output (SI-SIMO) architecture
is adopted to balance the SOC between two cells. The
balancing is limited to only two cells and the charging speed
is not optimized with operating conditions. In [5],
bidirectional charging/discharging balance is adopted.
This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology,
Taiwan under Grants MOST 109-2221-E-194-034-MY3.
Fig. 1. The proposed battery management system with charge
balancing and aging detection in UAV systems.
However, SOC balancing is not carried out in the charging
phase. Modular design for series discharge balance is
proposed in [6]. High scalability and charging speed could be
achieved owing to charging cells independently. But, more
magnetic elements are required in this architecture, which
causes higher costs and comparatively large volume.
Moreover, variations of the state of health (SOH) is not
addressed in the prior articles. For the cell with the lower
SOH, charging with the same current will result in a higher
aging rate [7]. Conventionally, SOH diagnosis can be done by
electrochemical impedance spectra (EIS). The ac internal
resistance variations could be detected at the same time.
However, EIS is not suitable for real-time online diagnosis.
Another approach is to detect the increase of the built-in
resistance (BIR). The reduction of SOH will cause the
impedance increase and capacity attenuation. The BIR is
typically used as an indicator of aging effects. The precise
evaluation of BIR requires that the battery is still for a long
time and the open circuit voltage (OCV) is measured, which
is not suitable for real-time diagnosis either.
In this work, artificial neural network (ANN) is utilized to
learn the data obtained during BMS monitoring for SOH
detection. Through memorizing an amount of charging
results, it can perform generalization and deduction to
evaluate the aging effects and estimate the remaining life time
of the battery cells. As a result, more accurate battery
replacement timing could be obtained. Furthermore, the SOH
information is incorporated into the SOC balance scheme. The
SOC evaluation also adopts ANN to improve its accuracy. The
charge balancing scheme is implemented in a SI-SIMO
architecture and at the same time the single-capacitor balance
is utilized to implement parallel-connected charge balancing.
For charging protocol, the pulse charging is adopted to
improve the charging speed and slow the battery aging rate.
The proposed system is shown in Fig. 1, the SOC balancing,
the SOH detection, and the protection circuits are all designed

978-1-7281-9201-7/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE

Authorized licensed use limited to: SDM Institute Of Technology. Downloaded on February 27,2023 at 06:28:30 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
and integrated in this work to reach a optimal balance between an optimal charging rate, which improves the energy
the charging time and the aging rate. conversion efficiency of the battery charger. From the
II. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
A. SOC and SOH Detection
The battery model used in this work is shown in Fig. 2(a)
[8], where the internal capacitance is affected by SOC and
results in nonlinear values. Moreover, all of its resistance and
capacitance parameters will vary due to SOH. Here, SOH
detection is implemented based on ANN. Compared with the
traditional look-up table methods, it can infer results from not (a)
only recorded data but also unknown data. ANN has been
widely used in estimation of battery status recently [9-11]. The
ANN architecture for evaluation of SOH is shown in Fig. 2(b).
The information of the voltage, current, and temperature of the
cells are recorded through an MCU as data of input. Since
training data and time are closely related, in order to enhance
memory ability of the ANN, the voltage and current values are
delayed for 2 period of clocks. The output results are the
estimated BIR and internal capacitor values of the battery
cells. These values are then used to compensate for charging
loop transitions, temperature control, and quantification of
battery characteristics. Also, these data are utilized to drive for (b) (c)
the precise SOH, which is further used for SOC evaluation. Fig. 2. (a) The battery model used in this work. (b) Proposed
Because the charging SOC is a monotonic function, nonlinear ANN for the estimation of SOH. (c) Proposed NARX of SOC in
autoregressive exogenous (NARX) architecture is used for the BMS.
training as shown in Fig 2(c). It has time delay line to record
the dynamic input sequence and output results. The output of
the last results is used to decide the current SOC. NARX uses complete battery model shown in Fig 2(a), it can be seen that
static backpropagation algorithm to train time series data. the RC-parallel network can be approximately simplified to a
Owing to output feedback, this data-driven closed loop series connection of a capacitor and an internal resistance.
converges faster and generalizes better. Also, it can achieve Increasing internal resistance due to aging worsens the
extremely low training errors. charging efficiency and results in higher temperature rising,
B. Battery Charger which further accelerates the battery aging.
The architecture of the proposed battery charging system In this work, the battery charger integrates a highly precise
is shown in Fig. 3. It consists of charging circuits, battery current sensor to provide accurate current information. The
module, and an ANN, which is implemented on an MCU. The switching mechanism adopts bang-bang control for the
charging circuits are designed for three-stage charging. constant current loop. A high-speed comparator is designed
During the trickle current (TC) and constant current (CC) for voltage regulations during constant voltage (CV) stage.
stages, the battery module is switched to pulse charging The ANN algorithm controls through the analog-to-digital
topology [12]-[13]. The switching frequency of the pulses converter (ADC) on the MCU to quantize the voltage, current,
must be the minimum impedance of the battery EIS to reach and temperature information of each battery cell. The

Fig. 3. Block diagram of the proposed battery management system with charge balancing and aging detection based on ANN.

Authorized licensed use limited to: SDM Institute Of Technology. Downloaded on February 27,2023 at 06:28:30 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
sampling time of training data is 6 second. Sampled data are
sent to the ANN to estimate the SOC and SOH. Finally, MCU
will adjust the average current, temperature compensation for
charging the battery cells according to the SOC and SOH
information. Overall operating time for the system is less than
50 ms.
C. Battery Module and Charge Balancing
Fig. 4 illustrates the architecture of the battery module.
Four cells connected in parallel is utilized as a prototype for
the proposed charge balancing scheme. The temperature
information is provided by a thermistor. During charging
process, two cells are selected for charge balancing and the
other two cells are in capacitor balance. The selection is based
on the detected SOC status. For capacitor balance, the cell
Fig. 4. The four battery cells connected in parallel is utilized as a
with higher SOC is connected to the balance capacitor Cb to
prototype.
transfer energy to the capacitor. Afterward, Cb is switched to
connect with the cell with lower SOC. The stored energy is
transferred to this cell to balance the energy between two cells.
No cell is connected to each other directly at any time to
prevent self-balancing effects, which cause temperature rising
and accelerate aging of battery cells.
Fig. 5(a) demonstrates the concept of charge balancing
operations. Charging current is adjusted by the average current
through the inductor which is controlled by the
complementary duty cycles from the digital pulse-width
modulation (DPWM). Assuming cell1 has less charge than
that in cell4, the duty cycles for charging cell1 will be
increased, while in complementary the duty cycles for (a) (b)
charging cell4 are decreased. As shown in Fig. 5(b), the SOC
Fig. 5. (a) The principle of the proposed charge balancing. (b) The
of each cell can be balanced with the proposed architecture. principle of the proposed one-capacitor charge balancing.
The two cells with lower SOC are chosen for charge balancing
with higher priority. In addition, the temperature of each cell
is also considered. If the cell temperature is too high, charging
process will be paused and switched to other cells. Also, the
cell with higher SOH will be charged with a lower current.
When charge balancing among 4 cells is reached, they will be
fully charged in CC mode in turn to reach the CV stage. At
this time, all cells are allowed to directly connect in parallel
since they have approximately the same voltage.
III. SIMULATION RESULTS (a) (b)
Fig. 6(a). shows the absolute error of the learning SOC Fig. 6. Simulation results of NARX for SOC. (a) Results of SOC
with SOH variations from the proposed ANN. The training consider SOH variation. (b) Results of SOC doesn't consider SOH
tool is TensorFlow. The input data are normalized in advance. variation.
Supervised learning is used to input 700 training sets and 300
test sets. The network has 40 neurons and two hidden layers.
The activation function is used for performing nonlinear data
learning. It adopts tanh to diverge the values and sigmoid
converges to positive values. By training 100 times and setting
up a dropout rate of 70%, it obtains the final training group
and test group with both root mean square error (RMSE) of
merely 0.32%. The target curve overlaps the results of
prediction. Fig. 6(b) shows the results without considering
SOH variations. A RMSE of 0.73% is reached when assuming Fig. 7. Simulation results of the charging circuits for single battery
SOH of 100%. The RMSE gradually worsens when SOH cell in TC, CC, and CV stages.
decreases. A RMSE of 4.87% is observed at SOH of 95% and
affects the estimation of SOC about 5% error because of
capacity fading. With the proposed algorithm, the accuracy is with 0.1C charging current in TC mode and 0.5C current in
improved by 10 times. Moreover, not only the charging time CC mode is used. The switching frequency is 1MHz. Fig. 7
of battery cells is improved, but also the life time of battery shows the simulation results of the charging process in TC,
cells can be accurately predicted. CC, and CV stages, respectively.
The circuits of the proposed battery charger are designed
and simulated in TSMC 0.35 μm process. A 200 mAh battery

Authorized licensed use limited to: SDM Institute Of Technology. Downloaded on February 27,2023 at 06:28:30 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.

(a) (b)
Fig. 8. Simulation results of the behavior model of the (a) balancing
algorithm, and (b) unbalanced charging.
The behavior simulation of the charge balancing is shown
in Fig. 8(a). The initial SOC, BIR, and internal capacitance are
randomized in the constant current charging simulations. The
SOC of the four cells can be balanced and fully charged at the
same time. The charing process takes about 53 minutes. Fig.
8(b) shows the results of charging individually without charge
balancing. With the same charging current for each cell, all
cells complete charging with different charging time, as the
slowest takes 78 minutes. The proposed architecture saves up
to 30% of the total charging time. The performance summary
and comparison with prior works are summarized in Table I.
Compared to [14], the proposed battery charge balancing can
be operated with cells connected in parallel and take into
account of SOH. Therefore, the accuracy of the estimations
does not decrease with aging effects. Simulation results show
that a maximum of 94% conversion efficiency is achieved by
the proposed SI-SIMO charger.
IV. CONCLUSION
An accurate charge balancing system based on ANN is
presented. The proposed architecture can be applied to the
parallel-connected battery modules. The proposed ANN
architecture can effectively learn from battery charging data
and obtain more accurate SOC evaluation. Fast SOH
diagnosis can be achieved at the same time. The battery aging
rate and charging variations are successfully predicted. The
proposed charge balancing has higher balancing speed, and
achieves better accuracy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to acknowledge chip fabrication
support provided by Taiwan Semiconductor Research
Institute (TSRI), Taiwan, R. O. C.
REFERENCES
[1] A. A. Hussein, "Capacity fade estimation in electric vehicles Li-ion
batteries using artificial neural networks " 2013 IEEE Energy
Conversion Congress and Exposition, Sep. 2013.
[2] Leng, F. et al. Effect of Temperature on the Aging rate of Li Ion Battery
Operating above Room Temperature. Sci. Rep. 5, 12967; doi:
10.1038/srep12967 (2015).
[3] P. La and S. Choi, "Synthesis of Balancing Topologies for Parallel-
connected Battery Cells by Principle of Duality," 2019 10th
International Conference on Power Electronics and ECCE Asia, Busan,
Korea (South), 2019, pp. 1455-1459.
Authorized licensed use limited to: SDM Institute Of Technology. Downloaded on February 27,2023 at 06:28:30 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
TABLE I. Comparison of Cell-Balancing Techniques
[4] P. Liu and C. Yen, "A Fast-Charging Switching-Based Charger With
Adaptive Hybrid Duty Cycle Control for Multiple Batteries," in IEEE
Transactions on Power Electronics, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 1975-1983, Mar.
2017.
[5] Y. Cao and J. A. Abu Qahouq, "Evaluation of bi-directional single-
inductor multi-input battery system with state-of-charge balancing
control," in IET Power Electronics, vol. 11, no. 13, pp. 2140-2150,
Nov. 2018.
[6] Y. Yang, K. Hu and C. Tsai, "Digital Battery Management Design for
Point-of-Load Applications With Cell Balancing," in IEEE
Transactions on Industrial Electronics, vol. 67, no. 8, pp. 6365-6375,
Aug. 2020.
[7] P. Leijen, D. A. Steyn-Ross and N. Kularatna, "Use of Effective
Capacitance Variation as a Measure of State-of-Health in a Series-
Connected Automotive Battery Pack," in IEEE Transactions on
Vehicular Technology, vol. 67, no. 3, pp. 1961-1968, Mar. 2018.
[8] W. Wang, H. Shu-Hung Chung and J. Zhang, "Near-Real-Time
Parameter Estimation of an Electrical Battery Model With Multiple
Time Constants and SOC-Dependent Capacitance," in IEEE
Transactions on Power Electronics, vol. 29, no. 11, pp. 5905-5920,
Nov. 2014.
[9] D. N. T. How et. al., "State of Charge Estimation for Lithium-Ion
Batteries Using Model-Based and Data-Driven Methods: A Review,"
in IEEE Access, vol. 7, pp. 136116-136136, Sep. 2019.
[10] M. S. H. Lipu et al., "State of Charge Estimation for Lithium-Ion
Battery Using Recurrent NARX Neural Network Model Based
Lighting Search Algorithm," in IEEE Access, vol. 6, pp. 28150-28161,
May 2018.
[11] A. A. Hussein, "Adaptive Artificial Neural Network-Based Models for
Instantaneous Power Estimation Enhancement in Electric Vehicles’ Li-
Ion Batteries," in IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications, vol. 55,
no. 1, pp. 840-849, Jan.-Feb. 2019.
[12] J. M. Amanor-Boadu, A. Guiseppi-Elie and E. Sánchez-Sinencio,
"Search for Optimal Pulse Charging Parameters for Li-Ion Polymer
Batteries Using Taguchi Orthogonal Arrays," in IEEE Transactions on
Industrial Electronics, vol. 65, no. 11, pp. 8982-8992, Nov. 2018.
[13] J. M. Amanor-Boadu, M. A. Abouzied and E. Sánchez-Sinencio, "An
Efficient and Fast Li-Ion Battery Charging System Using Energy
Harvesting or Conventional Sources," in IEEE Transactions on
Industrial Electronics, vol. 65, no. 9, pp. 7383-7394, Sep. 2018.
[14] V. B. Vulligaddala et al., "A 7-Cell, Stackable, Li-Ion Monitoring and
Active/Passive Balancing IC With In-Built Cell Balancing Switches for
Electric and Hybrid Vehicles," in IEEE Transactions on Industrial
Informatics, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 3335-3344, May 2020.