A Plating-Free Charging Scheme for Battery Module Based on Anode Potential Estimation to Prevent Lithium Plating

Since fast charging schemes for lithium-ion batteries are known to lead to a reduction in battery capacity, there is a need to avoid lithium plating during the charging process. This paper designed an anode potential observer and a plating-free charging scheme for a battery module to avoid the risk of lithium plating for all cells in the module. The observer was designed using an electrochemical cell model and an electrical busbar model to estimate the anode potential of all cells within a parallel connected battery module. Due to its simplicity and low computational loads, the observer was easy to implement in a charge management system. The results demonstrated that the designed observer and charging scheme can accurately estimate the anode potential of all cells in the module. The estimation results of the observer were used in the plating-free charging scheme. Compared to conventional charging methods, the proposed scheme added an additional stage to estimate and control the anode potential, therefore reducing the risk of lithium plating during charging. It also reduced the peak temperature of the battery by approximately 9.8% and reduced the overall charging time by 18%.