This review provides an overview of new strategies to address the current challenges of automotive battery systems: Intelligent Battery Systems. They have the potential to make battery systems more performant and future-proof for coming generations of electric vehicles. The essential features of Intelligent Battery Systems are the accurate and robust determination of cell individual states and the ability to control the current of each cell by reconfiguration. They enable high-level functions like fault diagnostics, multi-objective balancing strategies, multilevel inverters, and hybrid energy storage systems. State of the art and recent advances in these topics are compiled and critically discussed in this article. A comprising, critical discussion of the implementation aspects of Intelligent Battery Systems complements the review. We touch on sensing, battery topologies and management, switching elements, communication architecture, and impact on the single-cell. This review contributes to transferring the best technologies from research to product development.

Novel intelligent battery systems are gaining importance with functional hardware on the cell level. Cell-level hardware allows for advanced battery state monitoring and thermal management, but also leads to additional thermal interactions. In this work, an electro-thermal framework for the modeling of these novel intelligent battery cells is provided. Thereby, a lumped thermal model, as well as a novel neural network, are implemented in the framework as thermal submodels. For the first time, a direct comparison of a physics-based and a data-driven thermal battery model is performed in the same framework. The models are compared in terms of temperature estimation with regard to accuracy. Both models are very well suited to represent the thermal behavior in novel intelligent battery cells. In terms of accuracy and computation time, however, the data-driven neural network approach with a Nonlinear AutoregRessive network with eXogeneous input (NARX) shows slight advantages. Finally, novel applications of temperature prediction in battery electric vehicles are presented and the applicability of the models is illustrated. Thereby, the conventional prediction of the state of power is extended by simultaneous temperature prediction. Additionally, temperature forecasting is used for pre-conditioning by advanced cooling system regulation to enable energy efficiency and fast charging.

In electric vehicles with lithium-ion battery systems, the temperature of the battery cells has a great impact on performance, safety, and lifetime. Therefore, developing thermal models of lithium-ion batteries to predict and investigate the temperature development and its impact is crucial. Commonly, models are validated with experimental data to ensure correct model behaviour. However, influences of experimental setups or comprehensive validation concepts are often not considered, especially for the use case of prismatic cells in a battery electric vehicle. In this work, a 3D electro–thermal model is developed and experimentally validated to predict the cell’s temperature behaviour for a single prismatic cell under battery electric vehicle (BEV) boundary conditions. One focus is on the development of a single cell’s experimental setup and the investigation of the commonly neglected influences of an experimental setup on the cell’s thermal behaviour. Furthermore, a detailed validation is performed for the laboratory BEV scenario for spatially resolved temperatures and heat generation. For validation, static and dynamic loads are considered as well as the detected experimental influences. The validated model is used to predict the temperature within the cell in the BEV application for constant current and Worldwide harmonized Light vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP) load profile.