Accurate life prediction and reliability evaluation of lithium-ion batteries are of great significance for predictive maintenance. In the whole life cycle of a battery, the accurate description of the dynamic and stochastic characteristics of life has always been a key problem. In this paper, the concept of the digital twin is introduced, and a digital twin for reliability based on remaining useful cycle life prediction is proposed for lithium-ion batteries. The capacity degradation model, stochastic degradation model, life prediction, and reliability evaluation model are established to describe the randomness of battery degradation and the dispersion of the life of multiple cells. Based on the Bayesian algorithm, an adaptive evolution method for the model of the digital twin is proposed to improve prediction accuracy, followed by experimental verification. Finally, the life prediction, reliability evaluation, and predictive maintenance of the battery based on the digital twin are implemented. The results show the digital twin for reliability has good accuracy in the whole life cycle. The error can be controlled at about 5% with the adaptive evolution algorithm. For battery L1 and L6 in this case, predictive maintenance costs are expected to decrease by 62.0% and 52.5%, respectively.

Online state-of-charge (SOC) estimation for lithium-ion batteries is one of the most important tasks of the battery management system in ensuring its operation safety and reliability. Due to the advantages of learning the long-term dependencies in between the sequential data, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been developed and have shown their superiority over SOC estimation. However, only time-series measurements (e.g., voltage and current) are taken as inputs in these RNNs. Considering that the mapping relationship between the SOC and the time-series measurements evolves along with the battery degradation, there still remains a challenge for RNNs to estimate the SOC accurately throughout the battery’s lifetime. In this paper, a dual-input neural network combining gated recurring unit (GRU) layers and fully connected layers (acronymized as a DIGF network) is developed to overcome the above-mentioned challenge. Its most important characteristic is the adoption of the state of health (SOH) of the battery as the network input, in addition to time-series measurements. According to the experimental data from a batch of LiCoO₂ batteries, it is validated that the proposed DIGF network is capable of providing more accurate SOC estimations throughout the battery’s lifetime compared to the existing RNN counterparts. Moreover, it also shows greater robustness against different initial SOCs, making it more applicable for online SOC estimations in practical situations. Based on these verification results, it is concluded that the proposed DIGF network is feasible for estimating the battery’s SOC accurately throughout the battery’s lifetime against varying initial SOCs.