Constructing accurate equivalent electrical circuit models of lithium iron phosphate and lead-acid battery cells for solar home system applications

Yunhe Yu*, Nishant Narayan, Victor Vega-Garita, Jelena Popovic-Gerber, Zian Qin, Marnix Wagemaker, Pavol Bauer, Miro Zeman

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

21 Citations (Scopus)
88 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The past few years have seen strong growth of solar-based off-grid energy solutions such as Solar Home Systems (SHS) as a means to ameliorate the grave problem of energy poverty. Battery storage is an essential component of SHS. An accurate battery model can play a vital role in SHS design. Knowing the dynamic behaviour of the battery is important for the battery sizing and estimating the battery behaviour for the chosen application at the system design stage. In this paper, an accurate cell level dynamic battery model based on the electrical equivalent circuit is constructed for two battery technologies: the valve regulated lead-acid (VRLA) battery and the LiFePO4 (LFP) battery. Series of experiments were performed to obtain the relevant model parameters. This model is built for low C-rate applications (lower than 0.5 C-rate) as expected in SHS. The model considers the non-linear relation between the state of charge (SOC) and open circuit voltage (VOC) for both technologies. Additionally, the equivalent electrical circuit model for the VRLA battery was improved by including a 2nd order RC pair. The simulated model differs from the experimentally obtained result by less than 2%. This cell level battery model can be potentially scaled to battery pack level with flexible capacity, making the dynamic battery model a useful tool in SHS design.

Original languageEnglish
Article number2305
Pages (from-to)1-20
Number of pages20
JournalEnergies
Volume11
Issue number9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018

Keywords

  • Battery testing
  • Dynamic battery model
  • Electric equivalent circuit battery model
  • LiFePO4
  • Solar home systems
  • VRLA

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