In response to climate change, which is caused by the increasing pollution of the environment and leads to the deterioration of human health, future electricity generations should reduce reliance on fossil fuels by growing the use of clean and renewable energy generation sources and by using clean vehicle technologies. Battery storage systems have been recognized as one of the most promising approaches for supporting the renewable energy generation sources and cleanly powering vehicles instead of burning gasoline and diesel fuel. However, the cost of batteries is still a prominent barrier for their use in stationary and traction applications. As a rule, the cost of batteries can be decreased by lowering material costs, enhancing process efficiencies, and increasing production volume. Another more effective solution is called Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) application. In V2G application, the battery system can be used to support the grid services, whereas the battery is still in the vehicle. To make a battery system economically viable for V2G/G2V applications, an effective power-electronics converter should be selected as well. This converter should be supported by an advanced control strategy. Therefore, this article provides a detailed technical assessment and review of V2G/G2V concepts, in conjunction with various power-electronics converter topologies. In this paper, modeling and detailed control strategies are fully designed and investigated in terms of dynamic response and harmonics. Furthermore, an extensive design and analysis of charging systems for low-duty/high-duty vehicles are also presented.

Fast charging is an exciting topic in the field of electric and hybrid electric vehicles (EVs/HEVs). In order to achieve faster charging times, fast-charging applications involve high-current profiles which can lead to high cell temperature increase, and in some cases thermal runaways. There has been some research on the impact caused by fast-charging profiles. This research is mostly focused on the electrical, thermal and aging aspects of the cell individually, but these factors are never treated together. In this paper, the thermal progression of the lithium-ion battery under specific fast-charging profiles is investigated and modeled. The cell is a Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide/graphite-based cell (NMC) rated at 20 Ah, and thermal images during fast-charging have been taken at four degradation states: 100%, 90%, 85%, and 80% State-of-Health (SoH). A semi-empirical resistance aging model is developed using gathered data from extensive cycling and calendar aging tests, which is coupled to an electrothermal model. This novel combined model achieves good agreement with the measurements, with simulation results always within 2 °C of the measured values. This study presents a modeling methodology that is usable to predict the potential temperature distribution for lithium-ion batteries (LiBs) during fast-charging profiles at different aging states, which would be of benefit for Battery Management Systems (BMS) in future thermal strategies.

Recently, second-life battery systems have received a growing interest as one of the most promising alternatives for decreasing the overall cost of the battery storage systems in stationary applications. The high-cost of batteries represents a prominent barrier for their use in traction and stationary applications. To make second-life batteries economically viable for stationary applications, an effective power-electronics converter should be selected as well. This converter should be supported by an energy management strategy (EMS), which is needed for controlling the power flow among the second-life battery modules based on their available capacity and performance. This article presents the design, analysis and implementation of a generic energy management strategy (GEMS). The proposed GEMS aims to control and distribute the load demand between battery storage systems under different load conditions and disturbances. This manuscript provides the experimental verification of the proposed management strategy. The results have demonstrated that the GEMS can robustly handle any level of performance inequality among the used-battery modules with the aim to integrate different levels (i.e., size, capacity, and chemistry type) of the second-life battery modules at the same time and in the same application.