Capacity Estimation of Lithium-Ion Batteries Based on Multiple Small Voltage Sections and BP Neural Networks

Accurate capacity estimation of onboard lithium-ion batteries is crucial to the performance and safety of electric vehicles. In recent years, data-driven methods based on partial charging curve have been widely studied due to their low requirement of battery knowledge and easy implementation. However, existing data-driven methods are usually based on a fixed voltage segment or state of charge, which would be failed if the charging process does not cover the predetermined segment due to the user’s free charging behavior. This paper proposes a capacity estimation method using multiple small voltage sections and back propagation neural networks. It is intended to reduce the requirement of the length of voltage segment for estimating the complete battery capacity in an incomplete charging cycle. Firstly, the voltage segment most possibly covered is selected and divided into a number of small sections. Then, sectional capacity and skewness of the voltage curve are extracted from these small voltage sections, and severed as health factors. Secondly, the Box–Cox transformation is adopted to enhance the correlation between health factors and the capacity. Thirdly, multiple back propagation neural networks are constructed to achieve capacity estimation based on each voltage section, and their weighted average is taken as the final result. Finally, two public datasets are employed to verify the accuracy and generalization of the proposed method. Results show that the root mean square error of the fusion estimation is lower than 4.5%.