Energy 214 (2021) 118866

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Energy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/energy

An Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Method for Lithium Battery Systems

Based on Grid Search Support Vector Machine
Lei Yao a, b, Zhanpeng Fang a, b, *, Yanqiu Xiao a, b, Junjian Hou a, b, Zhijun Fu a, b
a
Henan Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing of Mechanical Equipment, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry, Zhengzhou, 450000, China
b
Henan Engineering Research Center of New Energy Vehicle Lightweight Design and Manufacturing, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry, Zhengzhou,
450000, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: For the safe operation of the electric vehicle, it is critical to quickly detect the safety state and accurately
Received 7 March 2020 identify the fault degree in battery packs. This article proposes a novel intelligent fault diagnosis method
Received in revised form for Lithium-ion batteries based on the support vector machine, which can identify the fault state and
2 September 2020
degree timely and efficiently. Due to the noise signal’s existence, firstly, the discrete cosine filtering
Accepted 16 September 2020
Available online 18 September 2020
method is adopted, and the truncated frequency is optimized based on the characteristic of white noise
to achieve reasonable denoising. Secondly, since the covariance matrix (CM) of filtered data is sensitive to
the current fluctuation, a modified covariance matrix (MCM) is proposed to reduce the influence of
Keywords:
Lithium-ion battery
current variation on the condition indicators. Thirdly, to ensure the accuracy and robustness of Support
Fault diagnosis Vector Machine (SVM), the grid search method is proposed to optimize the kernel function parameter
Grid search and penalty factor. Finally, the MCM and CM are respectively introduced into the model as the condition
Support vector machine indicators, and the results show that the former has high accuracy and timeliness. In summary, the
Modified covariance matrix proposed intelligent fault diagnosis method is feasible. It provides the theoretical basis for future fault
hierarchical management strategy of the battery system.
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
In the transportation field, electric vehicles (Evs) have been
widely recognized as an imperative option for environmental is-
sues, which has attracted full attention [1e3]. The battery pack is
the critical component in Evs that can provide high energy density
to meet the vehicle driving range requirements and offer high
power density to fit the acceleration and hill-climbing scenarios.
Due to the limitation of the single cell’s voltage and capacity, the
battery pack is typically composed of many cells in various series-
parallel modes. In recent years, a series of traffic accidents have
been reported many times in the complex operating environment
of Evs, exposing lots of security risks of the battery pack, which
should hinder the further promotion and application of Evs. So the
safety of the battery pack has become a crucial issue that should be
urgently investigated [4e6].
* Corresponding author. Henan Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing of
Mechanical Equipment, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry, Zhengzhou,
450000, China.
E-mail address: 2015073@zzuli.edu.cn (Z. Fang).
Ensuring the safe operation of Evs has become the core task for
the battery management system (BMS). The BMS can predict the
current working state of the battery by monitoring the voltage,
current and temperature to maintain the greater security diagnosis
accuracy [7,8]. Till now, many efforts have been devoted to devel-
oping various reliable BMS to improve the efficiency of battery
condition identification [9e11] and fault diagnosis [12e14]. How-
ever, most of the researches focus on the estimation of the state of
charge (SOC) [9,10], state of health (SOH) [15,16], state of energy
[17,18] and remaining useful life (RUL) [19] of the batteries. Re-
searches on the reliability and application technology for battery
pack are relatively scarce and not well-rounded.
In the practical application of power battery, only three pa-
rameters, voltage, current, and temperature, can be directly
collected. However, the current data acquisition is difficult, espe-
cially the parallel branch’s value, which is affected by electromag-
netic interference, so many battery fault diagnosis and prognostics
approach based on the variation of voltage and temperature pa-
rameters have been proposed. Simultaneously, according to
different data processing methods, research methods can be clas-
sified into three categories: thermal-model-based, voltage-model-

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2020.118866
0360-5442/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
L. Yao, Z. Fang, Y. Xiao et al.
based, and data-driven-based methods.
The thermal-model-based methods focus on detecting the cell
surface temperature or predicting the internal value trend to
determine the current working state. As the experimental process
is relatively direct and smooth, it has been widely adopted. Vis-
wanathan et al. [20] measured the entropy changes with the
various cathode and anode materials using an electrochemical
thermodynamic measurement system and presented the reversible
heat generation rate was found to be a significant portion of the
total heat generation rate. Fredrik et al. [21] reported that the cells’
heat release rate would increase with the rise of SOC, but the cor-
relation between total heat release and SOC decreases gradually.
Vantuch et al. [22] proposed that the changing trend of the battery
surface temperature was measured by infrared thermal imager in
long term monitoring and fault detection, but the accuracy and
robustness decreased. These methods are simple and easy to
operate, which can be identifying the rent working state of the
power battery to improve the fault identification rate. However,
those mentioned above have strict requirements on environmental
conditions and instruments, which cannot be applied to real ap-
plications. To combine the internal reaction degree of the cell with
the external parameters’ change, Panchal S et al. [23] presented a
mathematical model to predict the transient temperature and
voltage distributions at different discharging rates. Huo et al. [24]
studied a 3D model of a lithium-ion battery’s thermal performance
to analyze the dynamic thermal behavior by utilizing various drive
cycles. The electrochemical model of power battery can accurately
capture the intensity of the internal chemical reaction in different
loading ratios, which is of great significance for fault diagnosis.
Using the battery thermal model and the equivalent circuit model
(ECM), Dey. S. et al. [25,26] proposed an identification scheme
based on the Luenberger observer to detect and isolate three kinds
of thermal faults: internal thermal resistance fault, convective
cooling resistance fault, and thermal runaway. The cell surface
temperature feature can represent the current internal reaction
degree, but cell temperature can be affected by factors such as
location, internal resistance, cooling degree of the battery packs,
etc. Meanwhile, temperature change has specific hysteresis char-
acteristics: the heat will pass through a period from the inside to
the surface, leading to the low timeliness of the thermal-model-
based methods.
Compared with temperature signals, voltage signals are more
comfortable to acquire and more time-efficient, which many re-
searchers favored. Therefore, more publications are based on the
voltage signal to diagnose the faults. The voltage-model-based
methods usually include four key steps. The first step is to estab-
lish a model that can represent the dynamic characteristics of the
cells. Secondly, the parameters of the model are identified by
intelligent algorithms, such as the Kalman filtering, particle
filtering methods, and so on [27e29]. Thirdly, the parameters of cell
fault characteristics are determined, and the corresponding
threshold values are set [30]. Fourthly, the measured signal is
compared with the threshold to determine whether the fault has
occurred. Ouyang et al. [31] studied an internal short circuit
detection method using recursive least squares to estimate the
mean-difference model parameters, and the parameters of all cells
in the pack are compared with the set threshold to detect the fault
state. To avoid the occurrence of faults and accelerated cell aging,
Zheng et al. [32] investigated a differential voltage analysis method
to identify the battery’s current working state accurately. Xiong
et al. [6] proposed a two-step equivalent circuit battery model that
can provide a rapid and precise fault diagnosis result by separating
voltage variation caused by polarization and a significant voltage
drop caused by a large current. The accuracy of these diagnostic
methods are relatively high but mainly depends on the prediction
2
Energy 214 (2021) 118866
accuracy of model parameters, and the complexity of calculation
increases.
Recently, the data-driven-based methods have been widely
applied in the battery fault detection field due to the healthy
development momentum of big data processing technology. Zhao
et al. [33] proposed a machine-learning-based fault detection
method to detect abnormal changes in cells efficiently and accu-
rately. Xia et al. [4] presented a fault detection method for short
circuits based on the correlating efficiency of voltage curves, which
has strong robustness and anti-jamming ability. Yao et al. [34]
compared three different entropy algorithms to identify the con-
necting faults, which achieved a relatively small amount of calcu-
lation. Wang et al. [35] proposed a fault detection method based on
a modified Shannon entropy difference of each cell voltage to
determine the location and time of the fault. Based on the data-
driven principle, Zhao et al. [36] and Yao et al. [37] proposed a
new fault diagnosis method using a recurrent neural network and
convolution neural network with the dynamic characteristics of
lithium-ion power battery. These methods do not need to build a
battery model and complex parameter identification, which has the
advantages of high efficiency and reliability.
This paper mainly studies the intelligent diagnosis of the
connection fault of a series battery pack. The fault principle has
been described in detail in Ref. [34]. Due to the complex non-linear
time-varying system with the absolute inconsistency of the batte-
ries, it is difficult for the conventional methods to diagnose the cell
parameters’ abnormal change and predict the time of faults
occurring in the initial stage. Meanwhile, lithium-ion batteries can
be affected by road conditions, driving habits, environmental
temperature, and other factors making it challenging to provide a
real-time, accurate, and timely diagnosis in real operated Evs.
Therefore, to bridge these drawbacks, the condition indicators
based on the voltage data are mined and applied to support vector
machine (SVM) to diagnose the potential abnormality state and
classify the severity of fault accurately. Specifically, four parts are
made in this article. Firstly, an optimal filtering method is adopted
using a discrete cosine filter method based on white noise char-
acteristics. Secondly, the covariance matrix (CM) of filtered data is
analyzed, and a new condition indicator is determined. Thirdly, the
grid search method is adopted to optimize the kernel function
parameter and penalty factor to ensure the model’s accuracy and
robustness. Finally, through the training of SVM parameters by
condition indicators, the method can effectively realize the intel-
ligent fault diagnosis. Simultaneously, the MCM’s efficiency and
engineering practicability are verified from the identification rate
and diagnostic accuracy. The detailed test information of this paper
is shown in Fig. 1.
The rest of this paper is summarized as follows. The test work-
bench and cell are described in Section 2. The proposed fault
diagnosis method for a series battery pack is presented in Section 3.
The condition indicators and the optimal filtering method based on
white noise characteristics are both described in the following
section. The experimental results will be discussed in Section 5, and
finally, in Section 6, a summary of findings and the conclusion will
be presented.
2. Experimental study
2.1. Test platform
The test platform shown in Fig. 2 is to implement the battery
pack fault diagnosis, which contains a battery test instrument
(Digtron Battery Test System: BTS-600), a vibrating test bench, an
information collector, several voltage sensors and the data pro-
cessor. The battery tester, which integrates the power supply,
L. Yao, Z. Fang, Y. Xiao et al. Energy 214 (2021) 118866

Fig. 1. Framework of fault diagnosis algorithm.

electric load, signal acquisition, and transmission, is used for bat-
tery experiments to mainly simulate the charge and discharge
mode in the electric vehicle operation. The vibrating test bench will
simulate the battery pack’s bumpy state and provide a real vibra-
tion road environment. The information collector can obtain real-
time voltage values by some sensors and transmit them to the
upper computer. To reduce the influence of electromagnetic inter-
ference on the data acquisition system when the vibrating test
bench is working, the information collector will be covered in an
iron-box during the whole test process.
The test is conducted using the lithium-ion cells, which have a
nominal capacity of 50 Ah, produced by Tianjin Lishen battery Co,

3
L. Yao, Z. Fang, Y. Xiao et al. Energy 214 (2021) 118866

Fig. 2. Picture of the experimental system.

LTD, and LiMn2O4 will be used as the positive electrode and

graphite as the negative electrode. The general characteristics of
the battery are summarized in Table .1.

2.2. Test standard

The test standard mainly refers to China’s automobile standard:

“General Requirement of Traction Battery Enclosure for Electric
Vehicles,” which has explicit requirements for safety and reliability
of the power battery system. The measurement method for each
performance verification is established, including the vibration
frequency, acceleration value, and ambient temperature. The vi-
bration frequency is 10 Hze55 Hz, and the vibration acceleration is
10 g at 298 K.
The current value with the highest frequency is extracted from
the actual record data of the E150 vehicle operation in Beijing.
Through appropriate simplification, it is set as the value of this load.
The specific test parameters are shown in Fig. 3.

3. Diagnosis method
Fig. 3. Current loading curve.

3.1. Discrete cosine transform

extracted from the collected data.
With the development of technology, the Discrete Cosine
The most common DCT definition of a 1-D sequence of length N
Transform (DCT) has the property of the orthogonal transform,
is
which is widely used in signal and image processing [38]. This
method can quickly transform data from the time domain to the  
frequency domain, attempt to de-correlate the collection data, and X
N1
pð2x þ 1Þ
CðuÞ ¼ aðuÞ f ðxÞcos u (1)
enable each transform coefficient to encode independently after x¼0
2N
de-correlation. On the basis of preserving the authenticity of the
original image to the greatest extent, it can improve the compres- For. u ¼ 0; 1; 2; …; N  1where
sion rate and reduce the amount of data, although the data is lost to
8
some extent. Based on this theory, the noise characteristics can be >
>
>
< qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiqffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi u¼0
aðuÞ ¼ 1
=N
2
=N (2)
>
> 1uN1
Table 1 >
:
Characteristics of the tested cells.

Properties value
Where f(x) is the original signal, x ¼ 0,1,2…N-1; C(u) is the u-th
Length of cell 170 mm cosine transform coefficient, u is the generalized frequency vari-
Width of cell 43 mm
able; N is the number of original signals; aðuÞ is a compensation
Height of cell 100 mm
Nominal capacity 50 Ah
coefficient, which can make the DCT transform matrix to be the
Nominal voltage 3.6 V orthogonal matrix.
qffiffiffiP
Voltage range 3V-4.2 V
It is clear from (1) that foru ¼ 0, Cðu ¼ 0Þ ¼ N1 N1
x¼0 f ðxÞ. Thus,

4
L. Yao, Z. Fang, Y. Xiao et al.
the first transform coefficient is the average value of the sample
sequence.
Inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT) is the inverse trans-
formation of DCT, which can obtain the corresponding time-
domain data curve from the DCT coefficient curve.
In this paper, the voltage curve is composed of many different
frequencies and amplitudes, and the noise frequency is commonly
located in the high-frequency band. Therefore, combining the
calculation principles of DCT and IDCT, the noise characteristics in
the collected data can be gradually separated by selecting data of
different frequency stages. The core part is the determination of the
different cut-off frequencies (CFF), which is elaborated in the fourth
part of this paper.
3.2. Support vector machine (SVM)
SVM is a supervised learning method suitable for a small sam-
ple, nonlinear and high-dimensional data. It is a linear two classifier
defined to maximize the interval in the feature space. For the
nonlinear case, SVM mainly uses a kernel function to map the
original data to the high-dimensional Hibert space to achieve linear
separability, so as to solve the issue of linear inseparability in the
original space [39].
For a given linear separable training data set ðxi ; yi ; i ¼ 1; /; nÞ,
where x2Rn and y2Rn the separation hyperplane is obtained by
maximizing the interval or solving the corresponding convex
quadratic programming problem.
uT x þ b ¼ 0
Where u is a parameter vector, x and b are respectively sample data
and offset.
The corresponding classification decision function is:
 
f ðxÞ ¼ sgn uT x þ b
For linear-non-separable data sets, each sample point in-
troduces a relaxation variable xi  0 to represent a non-negative
measure of the misclassification error. Then the linear-non-
separable SVM can be represented by the following optimization
problems:
1 Xn
min kuk2 þ C xi
2 i¼1
s:t:yi ðuxi þ bÞ  1  xi
xi  0 i ¼ 1; 2; /; n
Where C is the penalty factor, which is generally determined by the
actual problem.
Combined with kernel function and soft interval maximization
principle, the classification decision function of non-linear SVM can
be obtained by using the dual function and Lagrange optimization
algorithm, as follows:
!
X
n
f ðxÞ ¼ sgn ai yi Kðx; xi Þ þ b
i¼1
Where ai  0 represents the Lagrange multiplier, and Kðx; xi Þ is the
kernel function, which satisfies Mercer theorem. In this paper, the
radial basis kernel function is chosen.
Energy 214 (2021) 118866
 
kx  xi k2
Kðx; xi Þ ¼ exp  (7)
2s2
Where s is the parameter of the Gaussian radial basis function
(RBF).
Penalty factor C and kernel function parameter s are two vari-
ables, which determine the classification accuracy. The optimiza-
tion of SVM parameters is explained in part 5.
4. Battery data analysis process
4.1. Preliminary analysis
The collected data usually includes normal operation data
signal, noise signal, and various types of fault information, which
has the characteristics of high time-varying, nonlinear, and
complexity. According to the principle of DCT and IDCT, this section
describes the noise filtering process of the collected data in detail.
As shown in Fig. 4, in real operated Evs, due to the existence of
noise, when the current is constant, many high-frequency tiny
burrs appear on the voltage curve, which often covers the initial
fault signal, increasing the difficulty of timeliness and accuracy of
fault diagnosis. Based on the difference between the frequency of
loading current and noise frequency, combined with the DCT
principle, the collected data is transformed from the time domain
to the frequency domain, as shown in Fig. 5.
In Fig. 5, the DCT coefficient is set to abscissa, and the amplitude
is ordinate. The location of the DCT coefficient n represents that the
(3) frequency is 2n, and the amplitude is the vibration amplitude of the
voltage at this point n.
To capture the change characteristics of the high-frequency
signal of experimental data under CFFs, the CFF function f is set,
as shown in Fig. 5, where i is the cut-off value. The amplitude-
frequency characteristic data of the high-frequency stage is trans-
(4) formed into time-domain data through IDCT. The mean value and
variance of the data are calculated respectively in Fig. 6.
Fig. 6(a) and (c) show the mean and variance of high-frequency
signals in the time domain at different CFFs, respectively. The lower
the CFF is, the higher the mean value and variance value of the cut-
off date in the time domain are. With the increase of the CFF, the
two curves decrease dramatically and approach to 0. To display the
change trend of mean and variance curve under high CFF more
(5)
(6)
Fig. 4. The original voltage data curve.
5
L. Yao, Z. Fang, Y. Xiao et al. Energy 214 (2021) 118866

basically parallel to the abscissa. However, the variance curve

changes smoothly with the increase of the CFF coefficient. After
n ¼ 400, the data changes are also approximately balanced with the
abscissa, which is consistent with the change of the mean curve. In
order to further verify the conclusion, the power spectrum curve of
the original function is calculated, as shown in Fig. 7.
Fig. 7 shows a certain power value in the low-frequency stage,
which decreases sharply with the increase of the CFF. When
n ¼ 400, the power value is approximately 0 in Fig. 7(b). It is
verified that when the frequency at n ¼ 400 is selected as the CFF,
the high-frequency data can be set as white noise. Combined with
the IDCT principle, the corresponding filtered voltage curve is ob-
tained, as shown in Fig. 8.
The setting of cut-off frequency is very crucial for subsequent
fault identification. If the CFF is set too high, the noise cannot be
removed to a large extent, increasing the difficulty of subsequent
fault identification; if it is set too low, it is easy to cause the voltage
data to not retain its actual characteristics. Based on the above
Fig. 5. DCT coefficient curve.
theoretical analysis, this paper sets the cut-off voltage frequency as
the frequency value when the DCT coefficient is 400.
accurately, the changing trend of the two curves at the inflection
point is amplified locally, as shown in Fig. 6(b) and (d) n ¼ 25 is the
4.2. Condition indicators
turning point for the change of the mean curve. Before that, the
data fluctuates obviously and declines sharply, and when the CFF
Generally, a series of statistical parameters from time-domain
coefficient is higher than 25, the mean data tends to be flat,
and frequency-domain signals are extracted with data mining

Fig. 6. Mean and variance curve. (a) global mean curve, (b) locally amplified mean curve, (c) global variance curve, (d) locally amplified variance curve.

6
L. Yao, Z. Fang, Y. Xiao et al. Energy 214 (2021) 118866

Fig. 7. Power spectrum curve. (a) global data curve, (b) local amplified data curve.

technology. The parameters are called condition indicators, which

need to reflect the current system’s working state quickly and ! !
1 Xm 1 Xm 1 Xm
honestly. Therefore, the selection of condition indicators is essen- cðv1 ;v2 Þ ¼ v  v vi;2  v
tial for the intelligent identification of the system state. m  1 i¼1 i;1 m i m;1 m i m;2
In data mining technology, covariance is the primary condition (9)
indicator, which has been widely used. Covariance is mainly used to
Therefore, the whole covariance matrix can be expressed as:

2 3
6 c11;2 c11;3 / c11;k c12;3 c12;4 / c12;k / c1k1;k 7
6 7

6 c21;2 c21;3 / c21;k c22;3 c22;4 / c22;k / c2k1;k 7
C ¼ C1;2 C1;3 / C1;k C2;3 C2;4 / C2;k / Ck1;k ¼6
6
7
7
6 « « « « « « « « « « 7
4 5
cNmþ1
1;2 cNmþ1
1;3 / cNmþ1
1;3 cNmþ1
1;3 cNmþ1
1;3 / cNmþ1
1;3 / Nmþ1
c1;3

(10)

measure the overall error of the two variables. If the changing

tendencies of the two variables are the same, the covariance be- Where cði;jÞ is the covariance value between cell i and cell j, k sug-
tween the two variables is positive; if the changing trend is the gests the number of the cells. N-Mþ1 expresses the number of the
opposite, the covariance will be negative. When the trend is inde- dimension of the covariance matrix.
pendent of each other, then the covariance is 0. For the data set X: Based on the above algorithm, the actual voltage covariance
(x1,x2) composed of two vectors, its length is n, and the covariance curve is obtained, as shown in Fig. 9. To some extent, the voltage
formula can be expressed as: covariance matrix reflects the correlation between each cell voltage
data. The overall covariance curve is consistent with the voltage
fluctuation curve. However, the loading mode greatly influences
the changing trend of terminal voltage, resulting in the data fluc-
tuation of variance matrix under different current, as shown in
Fig. 9(a).
! ! The fluctuation value of covariance data mainly includes two
1 Xn 1Xn 1Xn
cðx1 ;x2 Þ ¼ xi;1  x xi;2  x (8) values, which can be expressed as follows:
n1 i¼1 n i n;1 n i n;2
DC ¼ DC1 þ DC2 (11)
Where the cðx1 ;x2 Þ is the covariance value between x1 and x2, which
is a unitless value. Where DC1 is the relative difference, which is a function of the
Due to a large amount of data in the process of recording mul- internal resistance and the link impedance of the cell, and it is the
tiple sets of battery data, in order to reduce the amount of calcu- main parameter for fault identification. DC2 is the data difference,
lation and ensure the implementation of the algorithm, it is which is greatly affected by the current fluctuation.
necessary to set appropriate windows length. Set N as the total Because of the existence ofDC2 , the change range of covariance
running time and m as the moving window to simplify the calcu- data in the constant current mode is not apparent, increasing the
lation. The covariance formula can be expressed as: difficulty of accurate fault diagnosis. In order to eliminate the
7
L. Yao, Z. Fang, Y. Xiao et al. Energy 214 (2021) 118866

Fig. 8. The filtered voltage data curve.

Fig. 10. SVM parameters optimization diagram.

1 Xk X k
ccaði;jÞ ¼ caði;jÞ  ca ; a ¼ 1; 2; /N  m þ 1
ð1 þ kÞk i¼1 j¼1 ði;jÞ
jsi

(12)

Where caði;jÞ is the a-th unmodified covariance value between cell i

and cell j, and ccaði;jÞ is the corresponding modified value. k suggests
the number of cells. a is the a-th second value of the covariance
matrix.
As shown in Fig. 9(b), the modified covariance data is reduced by
order of magnitude. In the constant current stage, the fluctuation
degree of the curve has been improved to a certain extent, and the
difference between the cell voltage data has been expanded, which
will be beneficial to the identification of the current working state
of the battery.

5. Verification

5.1. SVM parameter selection

Based on the above description of the SVM principle, the penalty

factor C and kernel function parameter s are two variables that
determine the accuracy of the fault classification algorithm. If the C
value is too large, the classifier is easy to produce over-fitting,
which affects the algorithm’s generalization ability; if the C value
is too small, the classifier will not care about the identification er-
ror, resulting in low classification accuracy. While the parameter s
is an essential parameter in the kernel function, which affects the
complexity of the SVM classification algorithm. To summarize, C
and s are the key parameters that affect the performance of the
SVM classifier. To improve the accuracy and applicability of the
SVM classifier, this section uses a cross-validation (CV) and grid
search (GS) method to optimize its parameters.

Fig. 9. The voltage covariance data curve (a) unmodified data curve, (b) modified data
curve.
current influence, the mean value of all cells covariance data is used
as the basis, and each group of information is compared with the
mean value. The equation expression is as follows:
8
5.1.1. Cross-validation
CV is a statistical method used to verify the classifier perfor-
mance. The basic idea is to group the original data, one part as the
training set, and the other part as the verification set. The training
set is used to train the classifier, and then the verification set is used
to test the accuracy of the training model, which is used to evaluate
the performance of the classifier.
L. Yao, Z. Fang, Y. Xiao et al. Energy 214 (2021) 118866

In general, the original data is divided into N groups, each of
which is verified once, and the rest of the N-1 groups are used as
training sets. In this way, N models are obtained, the average value
of classification accuracy for the final verification set of N models is
used as the classifier’s performance index. This method can effec-
tively avoid over-learning and under-learning states, and the re-
sults have individual practicability.
very high while the value of the test set is deficient indicates that
the classifier has been in the state of over-learning, and the
generalization ability is weakened. In order to avoid the above
situation, the smaller penalty parameter C is a better choice when it
can achieve the highest accuracy of classification verification. So
this paper selects the best parameters according to the above
principle and marks the point with the red asterisk in Fig. 10.

5.2. Determination of SVM sample set

5.1.2. Grid search
The basic principle of the GS method is to divide the grid in a With the fault event’s occurrence, the voltage fluctuation in-
particular range and traverse all points in the network with the creases sharply with the increase of the charging and discharging
values of parameters C ands. Combined with the CV method, the time. In this paper, according to the different degrees of voltage
accuracy of the training set verification classification under this curve fluctuation during the charging and discharging cycle, the
parameter value is obtained. Finally, the parameters C and s with cycle data when n ¼ 4, 8, 10, and 13 are selected respectively, as
the highest accuracy are determined as the best parameters. The shown in Fig. 11.
results of parameter optimization are shown in Fig. 10, where the As shown in Fig. 11, there is also a significant difference in the
ranges of C and s are set to [-10, 20] and [-5, 10], respectively, and fault degree of the system over time. In order to facilitate the
the steps are 0.1.
Fig. 10 shows that the classification accuracy of parameters C
and s in a particular range is very high. Still, if the parameters are Table 2
not selected properly, the accuracy will be in a deficient range. The meaning of fault classification.
When the parameter values are appropriately selected and com- Serial number Grade m Meaning
bined, some points that can make the diagnostic accuracy reach the
1 1 No-fault
highest value can be obtained. In this paper, the asterisk is used to 2 2 Slight failure
mark them out. 3 3 Medium failure
The situation in which the training set classification accuracy is 4 4 Serious failure

Fig. 11. The charging and discharging voltage curve (a) n ¼ 4, (b) n ¼ 8, (c) n ¼ 10, (d) n ¼ 13.

9
L. Yao, Z. Fang, Y. Xiao et al. Energy 214 (2021) 118866

Table 3
The diagnostic accuracy and time consumption of SVM.

Serial number Diagnostic accuracy % Parameter SVM identification time/ Running time/s
identification time/s s

M U M U M U M U

1 97.1631 96.4539 167 498 0.038 0.615 168.02 498.65

2 97.8723 96.5427 172 511 0.052 1.549 172.45 513.01
3 97.6352 94.3262 163 505 0.053 1.167 163.70 506.71

observer to understand the battery fault, we divide the fault into data-driven is proposed for the lithium-ion battery system. Accu-
four levels. The fault degree from 1 to 4 increases gradually. There is rate and reliable experimental voltage data is essential to deter-
no fault at the first level, and serious fault at the fourth level, as mine the current working state of battery packs. However, due to
shown in Table 2. the noise interference’s real-time existence, it is challenging to
identify the fault state accurately in real-time. Therefore, a novel
implementation of the DCT denoising technique is firstly presented
5.3. Result analysis
for the actual voltage value, which mainly transforms the time-
domain signal of the battery system in the non-vibration state
Based on the above theoretical analysis, this paper takes four
into the frequency-domain signal. And the optimized truncated
cells in series as an example to verify the effectiveness and sensi-
frequency is obtained based on the working characteristics of white
tivity of this method. 677 sets of data are selected in the paper, of
noise, which can reduce the noise disturbance to the maximum
which 536 sets are set as training sets, which are mainly used to
extent without distortion of voltage data. Since the covariance
determine the optimal parameter value of SVM, and the remaining
curve of the collected data after denoising is sensitive to the fluc-
data is set as test sets to verify the accuracy of the algorithm and
tuation of load current, a modified covariance matrix is proposed as
prevent over-fitting. After further iterative training, several
the condition indicator of the SVM algorithm. The relative variation
different structures appear as classifiers of fault types and degrees.
of the covariance curve can be obtained by taking the mean of
The accuracy and immediacy of fault state identification are two
covariance as the cardinal number in the appropriate length win-
essential factors to evaluate whether the method has engineering
dow. By the cross validation and grid search, the kernel function
application value. Therefore, while obtaining high accuracy of fault
and penalty factor of SVM are optimized. Under the same diag-
diagnosis, the time consumed by state identification is also a critical
nostic accuracy, the smaller penalty factor is selected to improve
characterization parameter to evaluate the algorithm.
the algorithm’s generalization ability. Moreover, the fault degree of
In the paper, MCM and CM are used repeatedly as input vectors
the battery system varies in different working periods. Therefore,
to calculate the diagnostic accuracy and time consumed, as shown
based on the severity of voltage curve fluctuation, the system state
in Table .3. (M: Modified; U: Unmodified).
is divided into four levels. At last, through the comparison of the
Table .3 shows that when MCM is used as the input of SVM, the
diagnostic results of SVM with MCM and SVM with CM, both the
diagnostic accuracy rates are 97.1%, 97.8%, and 97.6%, respectively,
diagnostic accuracy is higher than 95%, which meets the engi-
with an average of 97.5%. There is a certain difference in each
neering requirements. But the consumed time is 167.38 s and
diagnostic accuracy value, mainly because the test set data and
505.8 s, respectively, saving 67%, which shows that the SVM with
training set data are randomly allocated to improve the robustness
MCM has high timeliness and can quickly identify the current
of the algorithm. The data of each training is not the same, and
working state of the system. To sum up, the proposed method not
there is a certain error in the diagnostic accuracy. When CM is used
only detects the voltage fault in time but also reflects the severity of
as the input, the above phenomena also exist in the multiple
the fault. It also provides the purpose and basis for the study of
diagnostic values of SVM, with the accuracy of 96.4%, 96.5%, and
battery system fault hierarchical management strategy, which will
94.3%, respectively, and an average value of 95.7%. The results show
be the focus of future further work.
that the accuracy of the fault diagnosis method based on GS-SVM is
higher than 95%, whether CM or MCM is used as the input variable,
which can meet the requirement of engineering application. Credit author statement
However, when the MCM is the input parameter, the precision
value is slightly better. Lei Yao: CRediT roles: Methodology; Data Curation; Writing-
In terms of immediacy, Table .3 shows the time spent in each Original Draft; Formal analysis. Zhanpeng Fang: CRediT roles:
step in two input quantities. When MCM is the input of SVM, the Writing-Review & Editing; Funding acquisition; Methodology;
time of parameter optimization and state identification is 167 s, Project administration; Resources; Supervision. Yanqiu Xiao:
172 s 163 s, and 0.038 s, 0.052 s 0.053 s, respectively. The total CRediT roles: Writing-Review & Editing; Formal analysis; Investi-
average time is 167.38 s. However, when MC is the input, the time is gation; Methodology. Junjian Hou: CRediT roles: Investigation;
498 s, 511 s, 505 s, and 0.615 s, 1.549 s, 1.167 s, respectively, and the Methodology. Zhijun Fu: CRediT roles: Formal analysis.
total average time is 505.8 s. The results show that the time of fault
diagnosis based on SVM is 33% based on CM, and 67% of the Declaration of competing interest
working time is saved.
To summarize, MCM is more suitable as the condition indicator The authors declare that they have no known competing
of state identification, making SVM reflect the system’s working financial interests or personal relationships that could have
state more quickly and accurately. appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

6. Conclusions Acknowledgements

In this study, an intelligent fault diagnosis method based on The authors are grateful to the financial support of National
10
L. Yao, Z. Fang, Y. Xiao et al.
Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51805491), and the Key
Scientific Research Projects of Higher Education Institutions in
Henan Province (No. 18A460035) and the Doctor Research Foun-
dation of Zhengzhou University of Light Industry (No. 2016BSJJ014).
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